


Things That Make Sound

by L_awlietxoxx



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Amnesia, Angst and Feels, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst and Porn, Angst with a Happy Ending, Artist Rey (Star Wars), Basically it's devoted Reylo with the wrench of amnesia thrown in, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Both sad babies meant to be together, But Ben is her mate and they both know it, But Rey never cheats on Ben!, F/M, For full disclosure I'm tagging Rey/OC, Infidelity, Lawyer Ben Solo, Mating, Mating Bond, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Modern Era, Non-Linear Narrative, Rey Needs A Hug, She is with someone else when she meets Ben, Very little to no love triangle drama, but happy ending I swear!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:41:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 45,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24366745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/L_awlietxoxx/pseuds/L_awlietxoxx
Summary: Ben knows he belongs to Rey from the first time he sees her. Rey knows one day she is different, though she can't remember why.Perhaps they will have no tomorrow while Rey has no yesterday. Still, they always have now.“I never… never knew it could feel like this.”For her, it’s always the first time.Ben presses in close to the slope of her neck, breathing in her perfect, sated scent - trying to hold it inside. To let it stain him from the inside out."It's like the world can never be the same."
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 662
Kudos: 974
Collections: Star Wars





	1. Been In Love With Her for Ages

**Author's Note:**

> So there I was, minding my own business, listening to one of my [all-time favorite songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCQVvXOL6Hs), when outta nowhere this entire fic idea just took me over and hasn't let me loose for the past few weeks. This song always throws me way deep in the feels, but add Reylo in the mix and I was done for. I churned out the angst and smut like I never even knew I could. If I've done a decent job realizing it, I hope this idea grabs you all as much as it did me. 
> 
> Love to [Ali](https://twitter.com/EverSoAli) for the beta and [Katie](https://twitter.com/lifeboldlyblows) for the mood board! Thanks to you gals, I didn't spiral in this fic obsession alone! :'')

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/49932358248/in/dateposted/)

Ben fights to hold on a little longer, not ready yet for all this to end. Not when Rey is panting beneath him, begging and mewling on the verge of her third orgasm. Not when she’s looking up at him with that wonder in her eyes. Her eyes shine with affection that borders recognition – just close enough to nearly break Ben’s heart.

Ben’s hips snap forward, driving in and in and in until she is full in every possible way, until every molecule of her being is possessed by him. She comes so hard she can’t seem to catch her breath. Ben fucks and fucks until his knot blocks the release from her body. Gasping for breath, tears glimmering in her eyelashes, Rey’s body spasms around the size of his knot where it’s lodged deep inside her. 

Fingers clutching him senselessly closer, heels digging in tight against his back, Rey murmurs his name in a tremulous whisper. 

And Ben topples over the ledge headfirst. 

He gathers her in his arms as he pumps her full of himself. He begs her over and over again, “Say my name.”

Her thighs shaking on either side of him as his knot swells still larger; as her body hungrily accepts each pulse of him within her, she rubs her cheek against his hair as she murmurs again and again with no small amount of awe in her voice, “Ben. Ben. _Ben._ ”

Afterwards, Rey will catch her breath, something between disbelief and elation warring in her expression as Ben cradles her close. 

“I never… never knew it could feel like that.”

For her, it’s always the first time. 

Ben presses in close to the slope of her neck, breathing in her perfect, sated scent - trying to hold it inside. To let it stain him from the inside out. 

“I know, sweetheart. It’s like the world can never be the same.”

For Ben, it’s the only time he feels alive. 

Until the hours pass. 

Until he turns on the shower, helps her in, and slips from the hotel room. Before she emerges from the bathroom a short while later, looking around and wondering just how she got there.

*

The first time Ben sees her, he can hardly tell her apart from the flowers. 

“Two bundles of the daisies and one of the violets, please,” she tells the shopkeeper. 

She smiles at nothing and no one in particular. Her long, bright skirt flutters against her ankles as if caught in gravity of her own making. 

“For a special occasion, Miss?” the shopkeeper asks as he hands her the requested flowers, all wrapped in a silk bow. 

“I…” She trails off as she reaches to take the flowers in her arms. As she extends her hands, Ben catches a glimpse of smudged ink along her wrist. With the flowers securely bundled in her arms, her smile makes a resurgence. “I don’t think so. Just to liven up the place.”

Half of her hair is woven back in a loose braid. The other half dances free against her shoulders. 

Ben loses all awareness of his body. All he retains of himself is the senses through which he perceives her. He doesn’t realize he’s been standing motionless in the shop entrance, until she turns and abruptly stops, nearly running into him. 

“I-I’m sorry,” Ben stutters for what might be the first time in his life. 

“Quite alright,” she chimes, her voice like a harp string plucked right inside his chest. 

But as Ben forces his concrete body to shift out of her way, she looks up and her gaze entangles with his. He watches her lips part and a soft, rosy warmth bloom in her cheeks as she now appears to grow roots of her own – tethered in place as she takes him in. 

Her mouth closes and parts again. Her throat bobs with the effort of her swallow. She shifts her bundle of flowers from one arm to the other, as something frustrated and upset seems to shade her features. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, soft and unsure now. “Do I…. do I know you?”

Ben blinks, his law school-educated mind struggling to take in the basic meaning of her words, while grappling with how to undo whatever it is that suddenly troubled her. 

At least three responses wrestle in his chest. 

One: _Yes. You must. I don’t know your name, but suddenly it is all I need to know in this world._

Two: _Yes. I feel it too._

Three: _No. And it’s the worst tragedy I’ve ever known._

“I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Relief floods plainly onto her face. Then in its place – a lingering intrigue. Her lips scrunch ever so slightly as she peers at him, and Ben feels in danger of floating. 

“What I mean is… I haven’t yet had the pleasure.”

He tries to exude at least some of his usual confidence as he extends a hand to her. 

She smiles again as she shuffles the flowers in her arms, then reaches for his hand.

“I’m Ben.”

Her slight, delicate hand seems to nearly disappear in his. Ben shakes and holds it more gently than he’s ever done anything in his life. 

“I’m Rey.”

Rey. _Rey._

He knew he couldn’t have imagined the radiance that seems to stream from her.

“I like your tie, Ben,” she glitters at him. 

“My…?” His senses working very slowly, Ben glances down to remember the black tie against his chest, striped in white and yellow. 

“You know what would be perfect to match?”

Rey reaches into one of her flower bundles, cheeks dimpled in levity as she fishes out a single daisy with a wide halo of bright petals. 

She steps close to him seemingly without a thought, and tucks the stem of the flower into the breast pocket of Ben’s suit jacket. 

“There.” 

She pats the flower’s new home once, before nearly blinding him with the rays of her smile in such close proximity. 

Ben tries to stop the trembling that’s begun in his hands. He tries to keep everything under some semblance of control – from his breathing, to the frantic way his eyes trace across and try to memorize all the details of her, when she’s here close enough to touch. 

“Promise you’ll keep it?”

“I… Yeah, I promise.”

She nods once, seeming satisfied. Ben swears some inscrutable layer lingers beneath her features – something that worries her, perhaps beyond even her own ability to name.

“Good. I hope I see you again, Ben.”

At the door, she smiles at him one more time. Except this time, there’s something distinctly sad in the curve of her bottom lip.

“Me too. Me too.”

She wiggles her fingers at him and is gone.

“Rey.”

It takes Ben a full five minutes to recall why he came into the flower shop to begin with. 

His mother’s birthday.

He selects a bouquet at random, and leaves the shop without the faintest idea what he purchased or how much he paid. 

He thinks only of her sacred, pristine smile. The brush of knuckles and fingertips that still leaves his arm tingling. The melody of her voice.

Suddenly, no other music will ever move him again.

The memory of her presence lingers in the air around him, echoing like a physical thing that makes sound. A thing he will never be able to do without.

His mate’s name is Rey. 

*

“Ben.”

Her voice is gentle – gentler still than the fingers with which she smooths his hair back, then traces lines from one mole to the next. 

Softer still is the embrace of her within, warm and slick and tender as Ben keeps emptying inside her. It’s been perhaps ten minutes, maybe more, and his knot has yet to release.

She’s on her back beneath him, gazing up at him with bleary endearment as her thighs cradle him close and her fingertips stroke his face. 

She frowns, as Ben’s vision swims. 

“Ben? Why are you crying?”

He hadn’t fully realized – those shimmering droplets along her shoulder had fallen from his eyes. He hadn’t quite recognized the soft sound of his own wet, broken breathing, through the lingering sensation of Rey tight and welcoming and perfect, where she holds him inside.

Her fingertips brush away tears as they trickle down his face. 

“What’s wrong?” she whispers, pulling him down a little closer so her lips can brush the corner of his mouth. “We’ve found each other. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Ben takes a deep breath, even as he shakes from head to toe. His knot is finally beginning to shrink, but in this moment he couldn’t dream of being anywhere but inside her.

“You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

She seems to glow as she hears the words. When she smiles up at him, he takes a long moment kissing every inch of it. 

“I love you, Rey. It’s just that… in the morning I’ll have to leave you.”

At that, her brow furrows. Her thighs lock a little more tightly around his hips and her fingers curl against his sides. Before she can question or protest, Ben kisses her again – this time deep and slow, sinking his tongue slowly past her lips to taste every inch of her mouth. He keeps kissing her, while he gradually starts to move inside her again. 

“Ben,” she gasps, as he kisses down her neck. One of his hands slides down to her thigh, gently urging her farther open as he eases in as deep as he can go. Her breathing glides up high, thin and euphoric as his knot pushes all the way past her inner muscles – as he knots her deep and holds her there, fluttering and quivering around him. 

She’s panting for breath, body straining even as her hands grip him close. “Ben. Ben. I want this forever. So full of you I can’t breathe…”

“I know, Rey. You were meant to fit me like this. And I was made to fill you.”

Ben seals his lips to her pulse point, lapping at the racing rhythm of her pleasure just beneath the skin. He savors each tiny, helpless sound she makes when he works his knot just that little bit deeper. 

He cleans her, after. Hooks her pliant, exhausted thighs over his shoulders and kisses where he’s just kept her knotted to himself for nearly an hour. He feels every inch of her quiver beneath him, feels her fingers desperate in his hair and her voice somewhere between sensation overload and entreaties for still more, more. 

She’s so hot, where he’s kept her stretched open for so long. He laps at the slick still dribbling from her, draws his tongue slowly around her clit just to hear her come apart. Then he presses his tongue inside, and there’s simply no resistance at all. She slips open and parts so easily around his tongue. He tastes everywhere inside her until her hands become nearly savage in his hair. When she comes again, she sounds near out of her mind with it. 

“Alpha,” she whimpers as the sensations shake their way through her.

Ben can’t help the impact it has on him, whenever she says it. It makes him automatically pull her against him – her back to his chest and his arms enveloping her completely as his mouth latches to the mating gland on the back of her neck. She arches back against him, her noises now sliding together into spiraling chants of his name. 

Whenever she calls him her Alpha – calls him what he is – he simply can’t control the need to have his mouth against her mating gland. There is no direct bite there, but something lingers – the distant scent of a Beta who’s done everything short of the claiming bite only an Alpha can deliver. It isn’t offensive to him the way another Alpha’s scent would be, but Ben shakes all the same with the urge to wipe it away for good. He’d sink his teeth into her gland, and from then on she’d smell only like him. As she was meant to. 

And Ben’s scent would take on hers – as he was meant to. 

Instead, Ben clings to control. He loosens his hold on her just enough so one hand can stroke up and down her side. At the back of her neck, he places slow, lingering kisses against her mating gland. She sighs, boneless and blissful in his arms.

“Alpha,” she murmurs again, sated and loving. 

Ben kisses her neck, and lets himself pretend. 

“My beautiful Omega.”

Rey turns to twist closer to him. She is asleep within minutes, a smile curling her sleeping mouth. One of her hands rests over Ben’s side. 

Ben doesn’t sleep. He holds her for most of the night – kissing her hair, her forehead and cradling her to himself. 

It never gets any easier - when dawn begins to nudge through the curtains. He knows what he has to do, knows he’s done it countless times before, yet still it tears at his soul. 

_I love you. But in the morning I’ll have to leave you._

He can’t look at her, when he finally, carefully untangles himself from the relaxed warmth of her. When he finally pulls away from her scent of _home belonging acceptance._

He dresses, then fishes through his bag for a ballpoint pen. He sits on the edge of the bed and gently takes one of her wrists in his hands. He scrawls on her skin, “Take a shower before going home. Wipe this away.”

Before he leaves, he makes the mistake of looking at her again. Half of her sleeping lips are still pulled up in a smile. Ben wonders if, perhaps, she’s dreaming of him. Wonders at what point in her sleep does he become lost to her. 

He trails his hand one last time along her hair – barely touching for fear of waking her. 

It’s pathetic, how he almost feels tears rising again. Just like the night before, they gather without warning or consent. 

“Bye, Rey. I hope you have a good day.”

He closes the hotel room door as quietly as he can. He might not shower until that night, holding on to the memory of her scent all around him for as long as he can. Imagining that she is still with him. 

In the morning sunrise, Ben walks the whole way home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This entire fic is finished (yes, I was THAT obsessed that I powered through the whole thing in less than a month...) and updates will come every few days! I'm really excited to get this going through, so Chapter 2 will likely be up in a day or so. I can promise everyone now that this will have a hopeful/happy ending, so I hope you all stick around! :) Thanks so much for checking this out!  
> 
> 
> My tumblr's [here](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/) and my twitter's [here!](https://twitter.com/xoruffitup)


	2. Take This Pain, Give It A Name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's dive right on deeper into the angst, shall we? :''') I've absolutely loved hearing from you all - especially the readers who connected to the musical accompaniment as well as the story so far! <3 If you're familiar with [the song that inspired this whole thing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCQVvXOL6Hs), you know the lyrics are pretty damn killer to the feels. Although I wrote this with more of an idea to capture the essence of the song's soundscape rather than the particular lyrics, you might notice the words will resonate in new ways for different characters as the story progresses. I've also loved the twitter music recs of other songs that match the vibe!! KEEP THE SAD TUNES COMING! I'm planning to share a Spotify playlist soon with everything that fueled my insane writing trance to speed through this whole thing.
> 
> Hope you guys enjoy chapter 2! It was one of my favs to write. 
> 
> (Again, bless [Ali](https://twitter.com/EverSoAli) for the beta and [Katie](https://twitter.com/lifeboldlyblows) for the mood board!)

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/49932358248/in/dateposted/)

Ben finishes work late, and steps out into the rain. Umbrella raised, he makes his way quickly to his car.

Two blocks from home, he finds himself gazing out the window at a stoplight. That’s when he spots her. Whether his eyes found her first or the constant instinct always drawing him towards her, he cannot tell. 

She is shrunk back in the entrance of a narrow alley, between the coffee shop and a stationary store. She is soaked through, arms wrapped around herself as she huddles back against the building. 

Ben nearly causes an accident in his haste to pull his car over and park in a semi-legal spot along the sidewalk. He snatches up his umbrella as he scrambles from the car.

“Rey.”

She seems in a daze as she looks up at him. She’s shivering, her distress and sadness visible. Her eyes widen as she takes him in, something familiar about him tugging at her heart. Her mind supplies her no name, no precise memory, but he called her by name and she is simply so tired and so cold…

Ben hands her his umbrella, heedless of the rain in his own hair as he takes off his coat. He puts the coat around her shoulders, rubbing a hand against her arm in an attempt to warm her. 

“It’s okay. It’s Ben.”

He knows the name doesn’t mean much more to her than a vague stirring, but he can see her relief, that he doesn’t wait for her to struggle for the name herself. 

In a small, automatic motion, one of her hands reaches for his sleeve.

“Why are you out here?”

“I… I don’t remember.” Her voice is small, nearly swallowed by the rain. Her lips seem a little paler than usual, her hair plastered to her face. “I was heading home from the studio and I was… looking for something. Trying to go somewhere, but… I lost my way. The rain – it makes everything look so different.”

“It’s okay,” he says again. “Let’s get you warm and dry.”

Holding the umbrella over her, Ben leads her to his car and helps her into the passenger seat. He wavers for a moment as he circles around to the driver’s side door. 

He knows where she lives. But she doesn’t live alone and it might raise questions if she pulls up in a strange car. Just the idea of telling her she has to get out of the car without him feels like nothing he can stomach. As he starts the engine, one of her hands extends towards him and rests in his lap. When he pulls back into traffic, he makes the final turn towards his house, feeling selfish and guilty and glad.

“Ben,” she murmurs, thinking out loud, her fingers tracing a pattern along Ben’s thigh. 

“Yes,” he says as he parks in the driveway.

 _You know me_ , he wants to say. _I am yours._

She shivers against his side as they walk to the front door, as Ben pulls his keys out to let them both in. He’s brought her here only twice before. He tries to stop himself from doing it. The sight of her in his home, her body in his bed, her intoxicating scent lingering long after her memory has dissipated – it’s usually much too painful.

She said she’d gotten lost looking for something. Ben wonders if it was only coincidence that she’d ended up so close to where he lives.

The door closed against the rain and cold, Ben retrieves a towel from the closet near the door. He helps her take off his coat, now drenched, and wraps her in the wide towel. 

Her eyes stay glued to his face as his hands rub the chill away – as, wordless, he lifts the towel to her hair. 

He doesn’t disrupt whatever’s going on in her head to fill the gaps. Whatever she’s imagining might have happened between them to make him seem so familiar, to make his hands so sure yet tender against her. Whatever it is that makes him look at her as if he’s known her for lifetimes. 

Ben lets her imaginings be. He’s sure they are much more lovely than their stolen fragments of shared reality, though still insufficient to grasp the way the world transforms, when they’re together.

He speaks as softly as he can, in effort not to disrupt the peace surrounding them as the rain hums outside. 

“How about I order us some Italian?”

Rey blinks at him. Even as her hair continues to drip, her lips turn upward. A sliver of sunshine appears from her smile. 

“How did you know that’s my favorite?”

Fighting the sadness from his own smile, Ben touches the tip of her nose. 

“Just a guess.”

Ben hangs his dripping coat over one of the hooks alongside the door. 

“I’ll find some clothes for you, so you can shower and get warm. Food should be here by then.”

She nods. Ben watches as, without even looking to him in question, she walks farther inside and disappears down the hallway leading to his bathroom. 

Something warm and stinging pushes against Ben’s chest. She can’t recall being here before, yet she knows the way to his bathroom and makes herself at home. 

Ben searches through his bedroom closet until he finds an old, soft pair of pajamas. He opens the bathroom door just wide enough to leave them for her. 

“Do you need anything else?”

“No, I’m fine, thank you,” she replies through the door. “I’ll hang my clothes to dry on the rack here, if that’s okay?”

“Sure, that’s fine.”

Ben just stands outside the door for a minute, listening to the sound of the shower starting. Savoring each moment of proof that she’s here, in his space. 

Back in the kitchen, he orders her favorite lasagna and chicken parmesan for himself. He changes out of his rain-dappled suit. When Rey emerges from the bathroom, dry and rosy, she finds him on the sofa in the living room, television flashing. His pajama shirt hangs loose from her slight frame, the pants billowing. 

Automatically, she comes to curl up at his side. He rests an arm around her, lays a kiss in her hair, and breathes in the smell of his own soap mingling with her pheromones. 

“Feel better now?”

“Much. Like the bad day’s all washed away.”

He clicks the remote a few times, until the inane reality show he so hates appears.

Rey gives him a slight squeeze. “I watch this every week.”

“I know.”

She tucks her head in underneath his chin.

Rey doesn’t seem to remember the times she was here before – when they filled the kitchen with smoke during a failed cooking experiment, or when she insisted on building a blanket fort in the living room – but her body knows him. She fits against him immediately, needing no situating or adjustment. Her head rests against his chest with the ease of someone who’s laid it there countless times. 

Her scent shifts in trust and comfort, her body responding instinctively to his proximity – reveling in the warmth of his touch and the rightness of his scent.

The cavity in Ben’s chest that usually remains hollow is, for this moment, at peace. Just holding her, keeping her warm and dry and safe from the rain, eases his need to provide and care for his mate.

Ben combs his fingers through her warm, damp hair. “Can you believe Brooke just dumped him like that?”

Rey makes a sound of shock as she burrows closer to him. “I mean, Jake had it coming.”

“But she went for his money too. Damn.”

“I knew he shouldn’t have messed with her.”

The doorbell sounds. Ben goes to answer it and takes their food from the delivery person. 

When he brings her a plate of her favorite lasagna, she beams and pecks his lips. 

He settles back down beside her with his own food. When they’re finished, she collects their plates and stands, moving towards the kitchen. Ben looks after her. 

“You know where everything is?”

She hums. “I think so.”

When she returns, she’s holding something in her hands very carefully. Ben sits up when he sees she looks vaguely upset. 

She’s holding a single, dried daisy in her hands. Ben knows she found it on the kitchen windowsill, standing alone in a small, empty vase.

For a brief moment, hope surges within him. That the sight of it will unlock something in her – that she’ll remember the way everything around them slowed to a stop, that first time their eyes ever met.

“Ben?” she asks, voice hesitant and a touch anxious. “Where is this from?”

Ben swallows, making every effort not to show the disappointment welling within him as his hope sputters out. 

“It’s….” 

He stands, closes the distance to her and places one of his hands gently over the flower stem where it rests in her hands.

He looks into her eyes, seeking as deep as he can in search of some tiny spark of recognition. Even knowing he might be chasing something impossible.

“You gave me this flower. The very first time we met. You made me promise to keep it. For a while… I hoped you might recognize it. Recognize me, when you see it…”

Rey takes a deep breath. Her eyes are glimmering liquid now, her hands trembling beneath his as her bottom lip quavers. 

“I’m so sorry…”

“No. No, Rey…” Ben gently takes the dried flower from her hands and lays it aside. He steps close and wraps her in his arms, squeezing her when he feels how she clings to him. “It’s not your fault.”

She doesn’t cry. Her shoulders just jerk against him a few times, her breathing unsteady against his chest. Ben kisses her hair, her forehead. 

“You can see now. I kept my promise,” he murmurs, his tone as light and reassuring as he can manage.

“Yes, Ben. I see that.”

He holds her for a long time, stroking her hair until the distress unknots from her scent. Eventually, he feels her lifting onto her toes, pressing her face against his neck and breathing in, as if seeking more of his scent. 

Even knowing it’s a risk – all the reasons why he shouldn’t – Ben cannot resist what his Omega seems to be seeking. He lowers his head until his lips find the spot beneath her ear that makes her completely relaxed and breathless. He noses against it and kisses it until he has thoroughly scented her. 

“Ben,” she breathes, thankful. 

“Come on. Let’s get you to bed.”

Bringing her to the guest room, Ben thinks, is what feels right. What he should do. He found her helpless and lost in the rain tonight. As much as he’d like to believe he found her because he’d been meant to – that it had been their connection that urged her to walk this way and prompted him to look up at that stop light – he doesn’t relish imagining that someone else might have approached her. Someone else might have seen a beautiful woman in need of aid, and might have taken advantage.

He has already crossed lines tonight, bringing her home. She wouldn’t be here but for the fact that she lost her way and she owes him absolutely nothing. 

She’s been through so much today already. All he wants is for her to feel safe. Always. 

“Where do you sleep?” she asks as she gets in the narrow bed and Ben remains in the doorway.

“Just across the hall. I’m here if you need anything, alright?”

Rey nods, watching him with an expression vaguely confused as he turns out the lights and leaves the room. 

Ben brushes his teeth. He makes sure the kitchen is tidy, the flower she gave him returned to its vase, and then goes to bed himself. 

There’s no chance he’ll sleep. Not when Rey is under his roof – so far from him across the hall and yet so much closer than she usually is. Ben swears he can breathe her scent from all the way in the room next door.

She’s here. Omega is here. Home. 

Ben lays there for perhaps twenty minutes before he hears her soft footsteps crossing the hall. Her sweet smell wafts closer.

“Ben?” she asks softly from the doorway. “Are you still awake?”

“Yes, Rey.” 

She shuffles into the room, the light from street lamps through the window just enough for Ben to see her approach the bed. She has the over-long pajama sleeves twisted up between her hands. He sits up, watches her bite her lip. 

“I just… there’s something I can’t figure out.”

“What is it?”

She looks at him in the dimly lit bedroom, her eyes an open appeal. 

“Ben… Why don’t I live here?”

A great pressure suddenly appears upon his chest. He knows what she’s really asking. 

_Why don’t I live here with you?_

Ben swallows as he sits up in bed, as he shifts to the edge and reaches for her hands. 

In his head, he dredges up each and every time he’s had this argument with himself. He forces himself to voice the conclusion he’s reached, despite how each word lances him clean open – precise and devastating. 

“Because… you already live with someone who loves you. Someone who takes care of you and… helps you remember things I couldn’t.”

She nods faintly, even as her gaze seems fixed on some point far beyond him. Her fingers grip his tightly in return. 

“Will. I’ve known him my whole life. I never forget him.”

Ben is surprised, how much of a relief it is to hear. Part of him had always wondered whether she was aware she had someone waiting for her, each time they were together. He’d never enjoyed the thought that if not, she might have chosen differently – if she’d known exactly what her actions amounted to whenever she shared a bed with Ben. 

But she knows, which must mean she would have done nothing differently. 

Rey squeezes his hands again, her brow knitted as she considers her words. 

“I love Will. But Ben, I…” Her voice hitches, her lips part and begin to tremble. “I need you.”

Ben releases her hands – only to grip her elbows and pull her a small step closer to where he sits at the edge of the bed. 

The rash, reckless question is out of his mouth before he can stop it. They’re teetering at the edge, and Ben is too desperate to control himself. 

“Rey. Do you love me too?”

“I…” Slightly panicked though she appears, Rey looks directly into his face – back and forth between his eyes as he looks at her raptly, hoping beyond hope. “You look at me… touch me like you love me,” she whispers, awed. “I wish I could remember why. I wish I could remember why… why I feel this way around you.”

“What do you mean?” Ben asks, voice hushed. “Feel what way?”

“I feel something… strange, near you. I-I think you’re the only one who can make it better.”

She steps still closer to him – until Ben has to spread his knees where he sits so she can press close to stand between them. Her hands find his shoulders, fingers gripping the fabric of his sleep shirt. 

“Make what better?” Ben’s voice is only barely a whisper as his hands hover at her hips. 

Her tongue flicks out to wet her bottom lip. Even in the near-darkness, her eyes seem to blaze. 

“I’m… hot and aching. I can feel it dripping down my thighs.”

Breath thickens in Ben’s throat. His hands span her waist and squeeze lightly as the temperature in the room seems to spike.

“You didn’t give me underwear,” Rey breathes, coming even closer until she’s straddling one of his thighs, the damp pajama pants brushing against him. 

Ben fights to keep a hold of himself – to tame his Alpha urge to claim her. His hands tremble at her waist, as he fights to keep them there rather than roving across every last inch of her.

Rey’s hands slide upwards to cup his neck. She tips his head back, until Ben has nowhere to look but right at her. 

She leans still closer, her legs coming together against his thigh until she’s pushing herself against him, the fabric of Ben’s pajama pants growing still wetter between them. Breath hisses out between Ben’s teeth.

“Ben? Do you know what I taste like?”

Her voice is sweet and clear – genuine even as her hips speak a different, more wicked language. She’s rubbing herself back and forth against his thigh now, and Ben can feel clearly where she’s hot and leaking. All from being near him. From the intimacy her body knows so well.

He cranes his neck closer to her, his mouth parting in automatic intention to claim hers. He makes himself respond first.

“Yes, Rey. I know very well. And when you’re not here…. I dream about it.”

She moves to kneel on the bed now. Her knees on either side of him, she straddles him as she holds him in place, her fingers knotting in his hair as she breathes hot against his parted mouth. 

Without conscious intention, Ben’s hands stray down the slopes of her thighs.

“I want you to taste me,” Rey whispers, her breath coming short and wild now. “Fuck dreaming about it.” One of her hands slides down to cup the back of his neck. Ben’s breath nearly cuts out when her thumb presses to his gland, as she finds it on instinct in the dark. 

“And after your mouth is full of my slick, I want you to knot me.”

“Rey,” he growls.

“Knot me. Fill me up and keep me that way all night – first with your cock, then with all your cum. Then do it again. So I’ll smell like you, so you’ll be dripping out of me all week. Alpha…”

Ben’s answer is only a sharp growl, his vision blinking white as pure Alpha drive consumes him. Her small waist between his hands, he flips her to her back on the bed and practically rips the pajama bottoms from her. Ben is only vaguely aware of her whining his name in desperate encouragement, because she’s spreading her legs for him and the scent that pours forth to envelop him is… beyond description. If the house were on fire or the world all around them ending, Ben wouldn’t have a thought for anything but this. What he’s about to do.

He lifts her half off the bed as he brings her to his mouth. She sobs gratefully, her fingers sinking into his hair and pulling as her slick pulses out hot against his lips. 

His lips shining and filthy, her wetness already gleaming off his chin, Ben laps open-mouthed at her inner thighs, where her slick pools. Only once he has consumed every drop he can find does he return to the divine source. 

Feeling how her thighs tremble beneath his touch, how her voice has risen into a mindless, high-pitched noise of need, Ben gives her directly what she craves. 

He wraps his arms around her thighs, presses his face against her, and takes her clit straight between his lips. Rey rocks hard against his mouth, her fingers desperate in his hair, and Ben sucks at her until he hears her cry out – until some of the furious tension leaves her and her hands are only petting and insistent in his hair. 

Slick continues pouring from her even as she pants above him on her first comedown. As if his sustained attention only pushes her body higher and higher in endless arousal, Ben presses his tongue to her and swallows. Rey groans as he slides two fingers effortlessly inside her, as he sucks away the mess. He pumps his fingers all the way inside, breathing curses against her as he laps up each pulse of slick dislodged by his fingers.

It’s as if her body’s been storing it all up, waiting for him.

When she starts shaking and begging all over again, Ben takes her clit in his mouth again. He reaches a hand up her body to cover one of her breasts, listening for her gasp as he twists the hard peak of her nipple the way she likes. Inside her, he presses his fingers deeper, straight to the place he knows will make her unravel. Rey lets out a choked cry, spasming beneath him as the crest of her pleasure slams over her. Ben kisses her lower lips all the way through it. 

Then, he finally lifts his head. Rey’s face is flushed, her chest heaving. But her eyes are clear. They are focused on Ben in perfect, passionate lucidity. 

She is dripping from his face. When he slowly slides his fingers from her, he feels still another gush of slick. Her body remains hungry.

His cock screams to be inside her. Once he pushes his sleep pants and underwear off, her fingers reach for him immediately. He hisses as her tiny hands cup his angry, pulsating knot. “Rey,” he pleads in a strangle, as she tries in vain to make her fingers meet around the thickness of him, as she pumps him clumsily in her hurry to bring him to where her body is wet and gaping for him. 

Ben doesn’t think he’s ever seen his knot so big in his life. He’s never been this torturously hard. It has been months, since the last time….

“Ben,” she breathes, her thighs sliding up along his sides and her hands trailing up his back as he sinks in, in, all the way inside her. Ben groans, cursing low as he feels the hot, silken embrace of her take him whole. He pumps his hips once, slowly, whispering his wonder into the curve of her neck as she takes every last inch of him – so wet and willing that her body offers no resistance, only welcome. 

She unlocks something Ben always tries to keep contained – the Alpha hunger for her that is never fully sated. That howls within Ben each day when she is not there to take everything he needs to give her – his knot, his cum, his passion, his utter devotion.

Moving with Alpha fervor, Ben fucks her slowly and purposefully. Every drive inside her pushes her bodily up the bed. Ben moves with her, until he has her pinned between himself and the pillows against the headboard. Until he has her thighs splayed as wide open as they’ll go and she’s gasping rapture against his ear. His cock never withdraws all the way, just takes her a little deeper each and every time. And each time, she swallows him in. She whimpers his name, her arms and legs locked around him as she presses wet kisses to his ear and his neck, and inside she clenches around him – every inch of her offered for the taking.

“My omega,” Ben breathes into her skin, where his lips and teeth paint worship. “You take me so deep. Made for me - my Rey…”

He’s mindless now, with the uncomplicated, absolute truth of their union – the perfection of completion. It is all he knows, and it is deliverance. 

“Yours, yours. Ben – want to be yours…”

“You don’t know what I would do for you. To make you mine, the way you should be.”

“Make me yours, Ben. Knot me until I can’t go away. Fill me up so I can’t forget. Keep me. Ben….”

“Mate,” Ben gasps the word like a holy vow, and then his knot claims hold of her. 

Rey tips her head back in the pillows, her thighs cinching him tight to her as his knot locks him so deep inside of her she can see stars. 

Ben’s lips seal to the sensitive place along her collarbone that draws out a whine, as deep within her she begins to fill with wet, blissful heat. 

Rey can’t think. Overwhelmed by pleasure and the single-minded joy of _Alpha is inside – Alpha claims me and cares for me and loves me._

Ben holds her tight to him, slides his knot in just that tiny bit deeper that makes her cry out and her whole body jolt, and he feels his cock filling her with more and more seed than could possibly fit. 

He kisses her lips slowly, in awe. Blinking lazily, Rey reaches up to touch Ben’s face. 

“Alpha,” she murmurs. “I’ll be good for you. I’ll hold all of you.”

“Rey…”

Ben rolls them to their sides, holding her thigh in place around his hip as he keeps filling her. 

He kisses her between filthy, loving words, “I want you like this always. Full of my cum. Beautiful like nothing from this world. Made just for me, for me to treasure and care for and fuck senseless…”

Rey can’t quite speak. She kisses him back – sometimes interrupting him mid-word as she licks into his mouth. Sometimes she takes his tongue between her lips and just sucks, groaning in her throat. Then she’ll feel him twitch inside her, where he’s embedded so deep he reaches a place beyond all reason, and she’ll tremble and whine in his arms. 

A long time passes before Ben’s knot finally shrinks enough to slip out of her. Ben is already thinking about aftercare – carrying her to the bathroom to bathe her, where he’ll keep whispering soothing endearments to her, assuring her how very unspeakably good she is. 

Ben shifts towards the edge of the bed, when Rey’s arms lock around him. When he looks at her, he finds all trace of weariness or exhaustion gone from her face. 

“All night, Ben,” she says – her tone firm and determined. 

Ben’s mouth falls open for a moment, speechless.

“Rey – I wouldn’t want to…”

Rey shakes her head, already sitting up beside him. “I said to keep me full all night.”

Then, to Ben’s shock, she pushes him back into the pillows and clambers atop him, her knees straddling him. 

She cocks her head at him, hands on his shoulders and a wicked, breathtaking smile at her lips. 

“Don’t you want to stay inside me?”

“Rey,” Ben chokes out. “You have no idea-“

Nowhere near strong enough to resist what she’s offering, Ben splays one hand at her waist, bringing her closer to him. His other seizes one of her small, flawless tits, rolling the nipple until it hardens into a sweet, hard bud. 

He drags her closer against himself, until he can take her nipple into his mouth, followed by as much of her breast as will fit. He nibbles just a little, when he hears her moans go sharp. 

Below, she’s rubbing herself against him obscenely. Coating his recovering cock in her still-flowing slick and his own spend as it runs out from within her. 

Ben can hardly imagine how much must still be inside her, and his eyes nearly roll back in his head at the force of the primitive, possessive gratification it sparks within him. 

She reaches down between them to stroke him, her fingers taking their time, lovingly savoring the journey from his balls all the way to the head. She pouts slightly as she tries again to wrap her fingers around him and again, fails. 

“Ben?”

“Hm?” The sight of her small hand stroking him absorbs all his senses, as he becomes hard and desperate all over again beneath her touch.

“Do you think anyone else could possibly fit you?”

Rey spreads her knees and positions herself above him, bringing the head of his cock to kiss her entrance. With her other hand, she lifts his chin to look straight into her eyes. 

“Do you think anyone else could take your knot?”

Ben’s wide hands splay across her back. He looks up into her eyes with wonder and worship and starvation. 

“No one, Rey. Only you.”

She brushes her open lips against his just once, as she draws the head of his cock across her cunt.

“Watch it,” she murmurs, lips bumping against his. “Watch it go inside me.”

Ben looks down. Rey props her hands on his shoulders as she begins to sink down. Ben watches with rapt attention as the wide head of him pushes inside her, and a visible tremor rolls through her body. 

“Fuck, Rey,” Ben grits out as he watches her lower herself inch by inch. He gasps when about half his cock has disappeared within her, and he sees a thick trickle of his own spend leak out to drip down the remaining length of him. 

He swears again, fingers fisting in the sheets to stop himself from thrusting his hips upwards. Above him, she is flushed and focused and divine. 

“Ben,” she groans low, directly into his ear. And then she sinks down those last few inches, her cunt pressed flush against him, and Ben is near mindless for her. 

Rey simply stays there for a long moment, making Ben whimper and curse as she squeezes around him and experimentally moves her hips this way and that. 

“It’s like…,” she whispers, breathless, her head tipped back as her body works through the sensations of being so overwhelmingly full. “…like you touch me everywhere. Like I feel you in my very soul.”

Ben can do nothing but slide his hands down, then up her back – nothing but press countless revering kisses across every inch of her neck. 

He feels that every day. Every day since they met. His soul can’t breathe anymore without her presence pressed against it.

After that, Rey doesn’t need much more adjustment time. She slowly lifts herself once, then lowers back down onto him. She seems to remember then – she was made to fit him.

Her caution and inhibitions unravel completely. Like there’s something inside her that wants to devour him whole, she starts riding him at a full, urgent pace. Once she puts her strength into it - once the muscles of her thighs flex with the surging effort to lift herself the whole way up and down the entire length of him, and once she finds the angle for him to hit those deepest, sweetest places within her – then things get truly messy. 

With her Alpha inside her, Rey’s slick just keeps flowing. To add to the mess coursing out each time she sinks down on him, all of the cum Ben pumped her full with begins to spurt out. 

“Shit,” Ben growls, his hands tight around her waist as he helps her move. He tugs her down just a little bit harder each time, addicted to the sight of his own seed mixing with all her slick – watching them course out of her together and coat his cock completely as she writhes in his lap, confident and devastating. 

This is her - his mate. An hour ago she was pulling his hair, crying out her need; now she’s reducing him to a helpless supplicant as she moves above him, lithe and graceful and keeping him utterly in her thrall. 

This is his Omega – lost in the rain on her way home, but the only thing showing Ben his own way in the world.

Rey only stills above him when his knot becomes lodged within her and locks her in place. Ben feels her shudder between his hands, hears her panting against his shoulder as she quivers around the stretch of him. 

“Ben. Keep me full,” she begs against his ear as she trembles in his arms. Ben presses kisses into her shoulder as he reaches down to stroke her clit. Her breath catches, and she comes suddenly. Like a switch thrown, her inner muscles clamp up and squeeze around all of him. Ben’s teeth scrape against her neck as his orgasm tears through him, and then all the pressure within him breaks open like a dam and he’s filling her all over again. 

Rey sighs when she feels it – her body relaxing completely around him and a sound of contentment rising from her chest as she feels Ben’s release pumping out deep within her. 

Ben cradles her close as he lowers her down to the bed beside him. She clings to him, tucking herself in beneath his chin as Ben arranges them so she’s comfortable while they remain locked together.

The bedding is wet and ruined all around them, but Ben can’t bring himself to care. He kisses her brow more times than he can count, rubs his hands back and forth across her back. He strokes her hair back from her face and kisses across her hairline. 

Only then does he realize she is silently crying. 

“Let me be yours, Ben” she begs, her voice wet but unmistakable. “Let me be yours. I can’t – can’t be a good Omega, but I…. I want to be yours…”

Ben rests his teeth against her mating gland with just enough pressure to quiet and calm her. He doesn’t risk anything near the force to break skin – nothing that would cause a permanent mark. But just enough to soothe the woman who should be his mate. The woman he knows was born to be his, just as he was born for her. 

He breathes warmth against it, promising in fervent whispers – in the words he so longs to say to her every single day, “You are so good for me. I could never want any other. You are mine. You are mine, Rey.”

It is true. In this moment, she knows it. 

But at the same time, Ben knows it is so terribly far from true. 

“Ben,” she whimpers, holding him as tightly to herself as she can bring him. “I would love you. If-if I could remember… I know I would.”

Ben blinks back the haze in his vision. This is what he will have to cherish. This is the closest he will ever have.

“I know, Rey. I love you, and I know.”

In the early morning, Ben wakes to Rey in his bed with him. She is so warm, curled against him as she sleeps with his scent wrapped around her. Forcing himself to leave the bed feels like tearing off a limb. 

Ben knows, rationally, that this is better. He knows she won’t wake with the content affection in her eyes most people might, when they wake up alongside the person they’re meant to spend their life with. 

Instead, she will wake with confusion and hesitant questions. 

He has been broken-hearted enough times to know. 

Ben dresses for work. Before he leaves, he returns quietly to the bedroom with a ballpoint pen in hand. 

_Take a shower, clothes in bathroom. Call Will. Wipe this away._

*

Ignoring how much he feels a fool, Ben hovers outside the flower shop every day after meeting her. When she gave him that single daisy.

Rey. 

He stops each day on his way home from work. He browses inside for as long as he can until basic courtesy dictates he finally buy something. Then he walks the block a few times, looking out for her. 

It isn’t until the following week that he finally sees her again. 

He’s approaching the shop when he stops in his tracks. She’s just there – leaving the shop with a bundle of white roses in her arms. She turns to walk the opposite direction.

He runs without a second thought. 

“Rey!”

She turns uncertainly. Ben waits for her expression to clear – for the recognition and gladness to rise as he approaches. 

It never comes. 

The smile that had risen unbidden to his lips wilts slightly. 

“It’s me, Ben. Um… we met last week. In the flower shop.”

He’s even wearing the same tie. The one she liked.

“Oh…”

It isn’t the _yes, of course_ ‘Oh.’ It’s an ‘Oh’ of sympathy, followed by an apologetic clouding of her expression. 

“Forgive me. I… I have a condition, you see. The thing is, I sometimes find it hard to remember people I meet.”

Ben doesn’t understand. How could this possibly be? His entire world had irreversibly tilted on its axis the moment he met her. How could it possibly be true that she simply remains… unchanged? That she is completely unaware? 

How can she not feel the same glorious, free falling panic that has consumed him ever since – that wells up in him now as he stands in her presence?

“I… I don’t understand.”

She shifts the bundle of her flowers from one arm to the other, frowning at him. 

“I really am sorry…. Um, what did you say your name was again?”

He swallows, as all light and color seem to fade from the world. 

“Ben.”

“I’m sorry, Ben. I have to go. Don’t hold this against me if we meet again?”

Ben stands frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, watching her go. He stands there for a long time. 

“I won’t. Rey.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry to both my babies and to all of you T______T I promise the wait won't be long for the next part! In the meantime, please let me know what you thought!
> 
> Or, come flail with me on [tumblr](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/) or [twitter!](https://twitter.com/xoruffitup)


	3. What About These Feelings I've Got?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're blazing right on through this, and I know I'm trampling on a lot of hearts in the process! T___T Thanks to all of you who are sticking it out and putting your trust in me! I have an extreme attachment to my poor sad babies in this fic, so it's meant the world to see others growing attached as well. Thanks everyone for joining this angsty ride. <3
> 
> Credit to my girl [Ali](https://twitter.com/EverSoAli) for the much-needed neurology Ted Talk about how memory loss ACTUALLY works. And [Katie](https://twitter.com/lifeboldlyblows) for the mood board! Did I mention I didn't even ask? She just surprised me with it?! Certified Best :''D

  
[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/49932358248/in/dateposted/)  


Even knowing full well it isn’t a habit he should form, Ben can’t help himself from following her sometimes.

It starts on just the street where the flower shop stands. He eats dinner most nights in the restaurant across the street, watching for a glimpse of her. 

He follows just to see her turn right. The next week, he follows long enough to see her make a left turn after that. Before really meaning to, he knows it’s an art studio she heads home from each evening. Home for her is a narrow but brightly painted row house, with overflowing flower boxes. 

Ben starts spending his weekends in the corner of town between her house and the flower shop. 

It’s just for the superb coffee at that one café, he tries to tell himself. 

He knows it’s a lie.

And then, one Saturday afternoon, he sees her. 

Or rather – them. 

It’s a spring day, and Ben sits outside on the terrace of the café. Rey is wearing a sundress and laughing as they pass right by him, heading inside to order drinks to go. It’s a man with her, and he’s holding Rey’s hand. 

Rey points at something on the menu. She looks at him and they both laugh. He’s only a bit taller than her, dressed in jeans and a denim button-down. Sunglasses rest up in his strawberry blonde hair. They order together, and he pays for both of them. 

They pass by Ben’s table again on their way out. The man smells like a Beta.

“… on the way home?”

“No way, you are not going to fit another succulent on that windowsill.”

“But Will, I told you they need more friends.”

“Remember how your room at your parents’ got taken over by plants?”

“I didn’t expect that ivy to get so big…”

Not until they’re out of sight does Ben realize he has shattered the coffee mug in his hands.

  


*

  


After meeting Rey, Ben makes a single attempt with another woman.

He can’t even let her undress him.

  


*

  


“Favorite movie when you were a kid?”

“Hmm… _Mary Poppins_.”

“Favorite food?”

“Easy. Lasagna.”

Ben likes to do this sometimes. Ask her every question he can think of and carefully store all her answers away in his memory. 

To feel just a bit like he knows her.

He’s sitting propped against the pillows in the hotel bed, Rey resting back against his chest. The TV is on, but neither of them are really watching it. He’s shirtless, she’s naked but for her underwear. She keeps one hand laid against his thigh and her head against his shoulder. 

“Favorite animal?”

“I think… yeah, dolphins for sure.”

Ben thinks for a moment, then threads his fingers between hers and changes his approach.

“When you were little, did you have a dream of what you wanted to be when you grew up?”

Rey frowns a bit at that, considering. Ben watches her carefully. He doesn’t know exactly how far back her condition affects her memory. The questions help with that, too. 

“I wanted to be a painter. But not the kind whose works hang in museums – the kind who make therapeutic art, to help others feel better and realize their problems aren’t really so big.”

“Like an art psychologist?”

“I doubt my childhood self called it that, but yes, something like that.”

Her hand circles against his thigh. 

“Hey, Ben. Can I ask you questions now?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“What’s your job again?”

“I’m a lawyer. Boring corporate law, I’m afraid, but with any luck might make partner in the next few years.”

“Where do you live?”

“Elm Street and Northwest. The dark red, brick house.”

She goes quiet for a moment. Ben wonders if she’s thinking the description sounds familiar.

“What’s your favorite movie?”

“ _Space Odyssey._ ” 

He’s watched it with her at least twice. 

She spends a long time thinking through her next question. Ben traces gentle patterns along her bare shoulders and waits.

“How long have you known me?”

“About four months now.”

Rey makes a vague humming sound. “It feels like…. like I’ve known you for longer, somehow. Long enough that you would’ve learned all my favorite things a long time ago. And I’d know what you do at work…”

“We… don’t get to spend a whole lot of time together.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

The next question of his own comes to mind. It’s one he hasn’t been quite courageous enough to ask yet, but now seems the best opening he’ll ever have. 

“One last question?”

Rey nods. Ben squeezes her hand and takes a deep breath. 

“Who is Will?”

Rey looks away, lips pursed and tense. She looks down at their clasped hands for a moment, resting against his thigh. Much as perhaps she shouldn’t, she draws strength from it. She doesn’t pull away.

“He’s the one who writes these for me.”

Rey turns her hand so her wrist faces upwards, displaying the faded scrawl of ballpoint pen along the inside of her arm.

“He’s my oldest friend and now he’s my boyfriend.” 

“You live with him, don’t you?”

“Yeah. I… don’t know exactly for how long, but ever since we moved into the city together after finishing college.”

“So you met him at school?”

“Even before that. Will lived nearby. He was always around. We played together, did homework together. There was an orchard down the street where we always climbed trees in the spring. Ate the apples, even though they were still sour. He came around for dinners all the time, even though Mom would always complain that he never took his shoes off and tracked dirt all through the house.”

Ben swallows, conflict coursing through him between cherishing this first, tiny window into her childhood, and the inexorable jealousy that chases it. Rey remembers details about this man as a boy – even the meaningless ones.

“So you moved here together?” Ben follows up, surprised by how blithe he manages to pitch his voice.

Rey nods, and Ben feels the motion against his shoulder more than sees it.

“After the accident, I was afraid I’d never get out of my hometown. But Will always planned to leave, and he wanted to take me with him.”

Those ominous three syllables enter Ben’s head so loudly, he barely hears the rest of her words.

_Accident._

He bites his lip hard, until the tang of blood hits his tongue. He wants to push for more answers. He wants to know everything. He wants to never let her free of his embrace, do whatever it takes to keep the world from ever harming her again.

“I don’t want to answer questions anymore,” Rey murmurs. She lets go of Ben’s hand in favor of turning closer to him. She curls up against him, legs pulled up tight to her chest and her arms reaching their way up around his neck. 

Ben swallows – a difficult thing around the great amount of feeling lodged in his throat. 

“Okay, sweetheart.” He holds her tight to himself and kisses the top of her head. “It’s alright. I’m sorry.”

She never questions when he calls her terms of endearment. As far as her conscious memory supplies her – she just met Ben this morning, when she saw him over the avocado display at the grocery store. 

(“I think you dropped this,” Ben had said in greeting, stepping close to pick up the fruit that had just slipped from her hand, when their eyes met. 

“I… thank you.”

“I’m Ben.”

“Rey.”

“Can I… um, help you carry your groceries?”

“Yes. That… that would be lovely.”)

Yet, she almost always sinks into this same immediate ease and familiarity with him. As if she simply trusts the instincts of safety and belonging that buoy within her in proximity to her Alpha . Even if she doesn’t understand – even if she hasn’t realized why.

Rey lifts her head to find Ben’s lips. They don’t talk much more, after that.

  


* 

  


Rey is standing in the doorway to the bathroom. 

His bathroom. In his house. Ben knows full well it isn’t a good idea to bring her here, knows it will mean days of misery while her scent lingers after she’s gone. But bringing her here seems to have some pleasant effect on her. Being in his home, where everything smells like him – it seems to put her so at ease. Seems to bring her clarity.

Sometimes, it makes her dangerously confident, breathing in lungfuls of her Alpha’s pheromones. 

Ben comes back from the bedroom with clothes for her, after she said she wanted to shower. 

Rey is standing in the doorway to the bathroom, naked. 

Behind her, the shower is already running and steam fills the room. 

“Ben,” she says. “I didn’t mean I wanted to shower alone.”

Her hair is loose and wild around her shoulders. Her nipples are pert and so very pink. 

“Hurry up,” she says, turning towards the shower and looking over her shoulder at him, lips drawing up in a coy smile that stabs Ben straight through. “Wouldn’t want to waste water.”

Under the spray, she washes his hair for him. He soaps her up, and then she holds his gaze in the hot steam as she takes his hand in hers and brings it between her legs. 

Ben lifts her against the shower wall and holds her legs apart with his hips. Her fingernails raking his shoulder and groans echoing against the tiles, Ben strokes and fingers her until the water goes cold. 

They’re both dripping when they step from the shower. Ben reaches for a towel to dry her, but Rey has other plans. She kisses him hard, one hand reaching to touch where he’s already erect. 

Ben takes one look into her eyes. He sees the clear-headed conviction there, and lets his instincts take over. 

He carries her to his bedroom. Without a single care for how their dripping bodies drench his sheets, Ben lays her out and slides himself in between her thighs. He presses deep within her, and Rey makes a noise like she’s seeing the world in color for the first time. 

Ben brings towels, afterwards. All the towels he can find. She’s shivering a little, so he wraps her in no less than three towels (only one for himself) and sets about rubbing warmth into her arms. 

“I have some lasagna in the freezer,” he says, and his heart blooms in tandem with her smile. 

Once she’s wrapped in both his scent and his clothes, they eat a tray of lasagna together in Ben’s kitchen. Rey chases his fork away, when he strays beyond his half. Ben sneaks in to steal a huge bite from what’s definitively her portion. When she gapes at him in betrayal, he just grins. 

“If there’s dessert, you’re not getting any.”

Ben watches as Rey digs the ice cream out of his freezer. It’s strawberry – her favorite – and Ben keeps buying it every time he goes shopping. There must be at least five in the freezer by now. She’s never around enough to eat them, but for some reason Ben can’t seem to stop.

She sticks her tongue out at him as she retrieves herself a spoon. Ben notes she goes immediately to the right drawer, without seeming to think on it.

She opens the container and declares, “It’s only just, right Mr. Lawyer?”

And then she’s in his kitchen, spooning strawberry ice cream between her lips with his giant pajama shirt slipping off her shoulders. Her hair is damp and her feet are bare, and she smells like him everywhere. She remembered his job and…

“Ben?” Her voice seems to reach him from a great distance. “Are you alright?”

When Ben returns to earth, she’s looking at him in concern, ice cream container set aside. She’s crossed the kitchen to stand in front of him, her small hands resting against his chest. 

Ben clears his throat, standing up straighter. “I’m fine.”

One of his hands floats automatically to rest at her hip. His other lifts to her face, brushing hair back before he cups her cheek. His thumb strokes back and forth, and Rey twinkles up at him as she tilts her head into his touch. 

“You’re here. So I… I’m more than fine, Rey.”

She lifts up onto her toes to kiss him slowly. After his tongue sweeps through her mouth, she pulls back to murmur, “You just wanted to taste ice cream, didn’t you?”

Ben chuckles, kissing the corner of her mouth, then her jaw. “Found me out.”

“Knew you were no good.”

Rey lifts her head towards him again, but her eye catches the vase on the windowsill holding a single dried daisy. She stills, gaze trapped by it. 

Ben glances over and realizes what’s caught her attention. He focuses on her face again, just silently watching her for any sort of recognition. He brushes her hair back again, not really expecting it to come – just waiting for her to work through what must be a strange pang of familiarity.

Perhaps it all feels like deja vu to her. An unplaceable feeling that she’s been here before, seen these sights before – with no memory to trace the sensation back to.

Rey’s brow furrows. Her smile withers as an unmistakable flash of distress crosses her face. She sways slightly on her feet, and Ben immediately holds her at the waist. 

Before he can ask if she’s alright, she turns her head, looking around the kitchen slowly with confused, troubled eyes. When her gaze finally lands on her own hands splayed against Ben’s chest, then traces slowly up to his face, her confusion dissolves into anguish. 

“Ben?” she whispers, timid and unsure. 

Ben doesn’t know what just happened. It usually isn’t until they part that her memories of him dissipate, and she just said his name...

“Yes, Rey. It’s me. I’m here.”

She simply searches his eyes for a long time. Slowly, she lifts her hands to his face. Her chin begins to tremble as her fingertips map the planes and angles of his face. 

“Ben,” she says again – a mournful breath this time. 

Ben grows concerned, feeling how unstable she still seems to be on her feet. 

“How about we get you to bed?” he suggests gently. He bends to lift her up into his arms and she goes easily, immediately curling herself to the shape of his shoulders. 

To his own bedroom this time – where the sheets are already drenched in the heavenly scent of their earlier lovemaking. 

Ben tucks her in beneath the blankets. He turns the light off, then comes to join her. She immediately slides close to him, and he wraps her up tight in his arms. 

In his embrace, Rey’s hands cling to whatever they can reach of him. His arm, the back of his shirt. Silence fills the bedroom for a long time until Rey separates from him only just enough so her words can escape. 

“You’ve probably noticed that I… I forget things.”

Her fingers twist a little more tightly in Ben’s shirt. 

“I know you’ve held me like this so many times, even though I can’t remember a single one before tonight. No matter how badly I wish I did…” 

Her voice cracks, and Ben draws her close all over again, hushing into her hair. 

“It’s okay, Rey. I know you try. I know you can’t help…”

“It isn’t okay,” she bites out, her whole body shaking. “My life is robbed from me every single day.” Her body lurches against him in shuddering motions. She presses her face tight against his chest. “Ben… even though I can’t remember how, I know that you - you’re meant to be my mate. But tomorrow I won’t even know your name.”

Ben’s heart nearly bursts in joy at that word from her lips. She feels it too. 

_Mate. Omega knows she belongs here. She belongs with me._

And then it all rushes away from him in the space of a single breath. 

_Tomorrow I won’t even know your name._

Rey is shaking against him now, shoulders trembling as if she’s crying, even as her voice remains determined.

“But I don’t want to forget you. I don’t ever want to forget what this feels like, being with you…”

The words are almost out before Ben can claw them back. All the promises she deserves – the promises he has never stopped wishing he could make to her since the moment he first laid eyes on her.

“Promise me you’ll never go away,” Rey pleads, her eyelashes wet now and glittering. “You’ll never leave me. Don’t send me away to live without you. Just… just give me time and I swear, each day, I’ll remember a little more. I swear, Ben, I’ll be a good mate for you.”

“Rey,” Ben chokes out, forcing himself to swallow back the rush of heartache and unfulfilled longing that has built and built within him for so long now. He hadn’t realized until this moment that it had grown into a veritable flood. 

He cannot process everything he’s feeling – it’s too much. He focuses on Rey instead – calming his mate and telling her what she needs to hear.

“You are a good mate. My mate. My one, perfect mate. I swear, Rey, I would never leave you.”

Ben holds her fiercely against himself. He bites his lip hard to stop himself from drowning in how desperately he wishes the words were true – in how bitter they taste on his tongue. There isn’t much he wouldn’t give, to be able to mean his promises. 

“I want you, Ben,” Rey murmurs, over and over like a mantra as he rocks her. “I want you. I want this life with you. I know I’d get better, if I stay with you. Please, Ben, I want you…”

“You’re already perfect, Rey. Everything I could ever want. I promise, I’m never going to let you go.”

He holds her all the way until she falls asleep. Until her fingers slowly relax in his shirt and the harsh hiccups of her breathing even out. Then a while longer after that. 

Finally, Ben slowly and carefully untangles himself from Rey’s sleeping form. He sinks down to the floor beside the bed, his knees folding up towards his chest and his head dropping forward into his hands. 

He tries to fight the terrible loneliness closing in on him, even while his mate sleeps in the bed so near.

He sits at the bedside all night, blinking back the despair that threatens to flood out, thinking hard about the things he has only ever allowed himself to imagine in passing.

He thinks about her living here. He thinks about keeping her, or running away with her. He thinks of never being without her – of neither of them ever being alone. 

He thinks about her heats. How he always feels them coming on no matter how far away he stays. How his body kicks into overdrive and shouts at him: _Why are you leaving her alone? This is all for her – everything mate needs. She’s in need and she’s in pain._

Ben will lock himself in his bedroom and hate every single time he has to take himself in hand just to force his knot down. Somewhere far away, he knows she is burning up without the relief she needs. Without him, the throes of her heat must be harsh and terrible. Sometimes he digs his nails into his arm hard enough to draw blood, just to stop himself from running to her. 

Because she doesn’t spend her heats alone. 

Rey’s mating gland always smells like somebody else. At least, it does before Ben’s self-control drops and he inevitably presses his own lips to it. But Ben never leaves any lasting imprint, and the next time it will hold the Beta’s scent all over again. A Beta might not be able to give her the claiming bite, but their intimacy is clear.

Rey isn’t alone in the world. Ben may be meant for her according to hormones and physical compatibility, but he wonders what importance that really has. Ben may have let their connection completely upend his life, he may have sacrificed himself utterly to the dream of her as his mate, but can he expect her to do the same? 

Is every single thing he imagines nothing but selfish? Is it motivated more by his desperation to end his own yearning, rather than his desire to do what’s best for her?

She said she never forgets Will. And yet, Ben can’t shake the conviction that Rey doesn’t realize all she’d be sacrificing, when she begged him to stay. 

Because then, Ben pictures each morning. He has only stayed to let it happen twice, but they were enough to never forget.

No matter how content and satisfied Rey falls asleep, when she wakes at Ben’s side, it is without recognition or happiness in her eyes. 

She doesn’t know who he is, why they’re in bed together, or how they got that way. She is never truly alarmed - Ben’s scent and proximity putting her subconscious at ease - but Ben never stayed long, nor tried again. 

It always seemed better to make a clean break while she sleeps. To let all memory of him wash away in one swath of dream. 

Not easier. Never easier – but better. 

And Rey deserves more than that. Perhaps her body longs for Ben as much as his does for her, but he cannot stomach the idea of her waking up like that each and every day. She deserves to know the face waking beside her every morning. She deserves every connection she still retains to her past – the person who reminds her of the orchard down the street and the plants filling her childhood room. The person who knows her family and where she grew up, who tells her every day where she came from and who she is. 

Ben would do anything in the world for her. He’d carve out his own heart and offer it to her, if it would only heal her memory. 

But there is nothing. No amount of love or passion or devotion that can rewrite history, or engrave him in her memory for good.

Ben met her too late. She can never remember what comes after, and he can never know what came before.

He knows what he has to do.

*

It’s been a year and a half since he first met her in the flower shop. One month since Ben last saw her. All the memories of her he so cherishes keep circling back to that last night together – when she begged to stay with him, and Ben had to break a promise to his mate. 

He has started thinking it’s better this way. It’s better for her to remain oblivious. This way, he can spare her from ever again knowing the pain she felt that night. She will never know whatever might be lost. She will have nothing and no one to miss. 

Perhaps he was nothing but selfish from the beginning. She is happy. But Ben kept pulling her away from all that, tormenting both of them with stolen moments of a life they can never have. He made her meet her mate and lose him, over and over again. She might not remember the pain, but the fact remains. He caused her hurt.

He vows to stop seeing her. Vows to stop shopping where she shops, walking past the flower shop, sitting at that café on the weekends. And if, by some coincidence, he happens to see her – he won’t speak with her. He’ll remain invisible to her. He’ll let her be in peace. 

And Ben – Ben will endure. Somehow. He knows there will never be another for him, but he hopes that perhaps, in time, the ache of being without her will ease. Perhaps just a little. 

And then, one morning, Will walks into his office.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Want to get REALLY fucked up? Listen to [this and CRY WITH ME AAAALSDJFASKLFJ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT3yzVrp4o8)
> 
> So I made a purposeful choice to make Will an OC, rather than having it be Finn, Poe, or another character on whom readers would immediately project some sort of pre-existing perception or expectations. I also wanted the reader to feel Ben's position of having no idea what to expect from him. The next chapter has things moving in something of a different direction. 
> 
> Please let me roll around in your thoughts, reactions, and predictions in the meantime! I've been doing a bit of rewrites for later sections because I'm still compulsively obsessed with this fic, so the next update should come in the next few days or so. 
> 
> I'm mostly on [tumblr](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/) but also on [twitter!](https://twitter.com/xoruffitup)! THANK YOUU for reading and for all the love!


	4. He Looks Just Like Me But Six Foot Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a crazy world out there right now. Hope you all can enjoy a little bit of an escape.

  
[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/49932358248/in/dateposted/)  


“Mr. Solo?”

Ben looks up from his computer when his secretary unexpectedly pokes her head into his office. 

“He doesn’t have an appointment but, um… there’s a man here to see you who’s very insistent. He says it isn’t business.”

Ben glances behind her, out into the open office area. He catches a glimpse of strawberry blonde hair, and his blood seems to run cold. 

He rubs his suddenly damp palms against his trousers. 

“It’s fine. Send him in.”

Ben’s mind whirls in a panic, wondering if he’s come because something’s wrong with Rey, or just to confront Ben. Wondering how much he knows and how Ben will even make it through this conversation. 

Ben’s embarrassment, knowing that through Will’s eyes he’s probably little more than a cheater or predator, wars with his instinctive resentment that this man who was never meant for Rey is the one who happened to grow up down the street from her. 

Will steps into Ben’s office and closes the door behind himself. 

The look he gives Ben is…. not pure hatred, at least. There’s certainly a tint of dislike, but Will mostly just stares for a long moment, seemingly keen on examining every detail about Ben visible to the casual observer. 

Ben isn’t sure if he’s glad or not that he didn’t wear a full suit today – just dress pants and a dark sweater. Still at a loss for what to say or do, Ben stands from behind his desk. Will’s gaze tracks his height and darkens slightly. 

“So it’s you,” Will finally says. His voice is higher than Ben expected, and somewhat softer too. 

Ben remains guarded, still silent. He’s not sure exactly how much Will knows, and Ben doesn’t want to further incriminate himself. 

Will looks down, any challenge dropping from his gaze. His shoulders relax and lower slightly, as resignation seems to rise in him. 

“No need to be coy. I recognized your scent the second I walked in here. It’s the same one that’s always on Rey, after she disappears. I know what’s been going on.”

“Does she…”

“No, she doesn’t know I’m here. It wasn’t easy finding you.”

Silence fills the room. Ben feels it pressing against him, stifling him like a physical weight. Finally, Will lets out a long sigh and comes further into the room, only to drop messily into one of the chairs in front of Ben’s desk. Little by little, Ben’s instinct towards antagonism diminishes.

“I don’t know what to say,” Ben admits. 

Will leans forward, resting his elbows against his jean-clad knees and rubbing his hands across his face. 

“Could we just start at the beginning?”

He sits back. When he looks at Ben again, he simply looks weary. 

“Like, when was the beginning?”

Ben looks down at his shoes. In this context, recounting everything to the man who would be hurt by all of it, Ben doesn’t know how to explain that it never felt like something he consciously chose. It was just…. Rey walked into his life one day, and from that moment she ruled it. 

The beginning is a good place to start. 

“About a year and a half ago. I… met her in the flower shop on Belway.”

“And when did you start sleeping with her?”

Will doesn’t wince over the words, so Ben doesn’t either. 

“The first time was about a month after.”

“How?”

Ben looks at him then, really looks. He doesn’t mean to challenge, just to scrutinize.

“If you’re asking… as if I tricked or forced her-“

“No,” Will has the grace to quickly amend. “I know she was willing. She’s always telling me - just because she forgets a few things doesn’t mean she’s a child. She makes up her own mind.”

Ben swallows, guilt rising in him again as her words from the last time return to him: _Promise me you’ll never go away._

Will’s gaze extends off into the distance as he speaks, his tone musing and honest. 

“Can’t tell you how much it freaked me out, when she didn’t come home those first few times. It’s not unusual for her phone to be off or dead – she always forgets to charge it – but of course I could only think of horrific reasons why she hadn’t made it home.

“But she always came back safe. And after it happened a few times, I noticed she came home… happy. Like wherever she’d been couldn’t have been anything like the terrible things I’d imagined. It was somewhere… good for her.

“She’d tell me she couldn’t remember where she’d been. Part of me wondered if that was entirely true.” He breathes out in the exhale of a humorless laugh. “Even today, I couldn’t tell you if it was true or not.”

“She didn’t lie to you,” Ben finds himself saying. “She doesn’t know where I live, even though she’s been there. She doesn’t know I work here, even though I’ve told her. Right now, you know more about me than she does. I… finally stopped hoping she might remember something in the morning. She never did.”

Will looks at Ben for a long time, as Ben stares at a nondescript spot on the bookshelf, his expression morose. 

At last, Will speaks the words. 

“You’re her Alpha.”

Somehow, for some reason, this is the worst part. It cuts Ben clean through, until he can no longer stand on his feet. He sinks into the seat behind the desk and nods weakly. 

“Yes.”

Ben doesn’t voice the counterpart. The implication that is perhaps comparatively too painful for Will to accept just yet.

_She’s my Omega._

“But I’ve stopped trying to pretend there could be any future for us,” Ben admits – a heavy resolution behind his words, though they tear at his tongue. “I haven’t seen her these last few weeks and I know I should keep it that way, no matter how wrong it feels. For her sake. She needs care that I can’t give her. She needs someone who knows her past, like you do. Who can remind her who she is. 

“There was no purpose in meeting and losing her again and again. No good came of it, when she is better off and perfectly happy without any of it.” Ben tries to keep his voice pitched as evenly as he can. He has no desire to sound like he’s seeking pity. He has no delusions that he deserves any – certainly not from Will.

He can’t bring himself to look at the other man – lost in a directionless malaise. Ben had already vowed all this to himself weeks ago. But now, speaking it aloud… there’s a finality to it that makes his breath come short. 

He will never see Rey again. Will is both proof and witness. 

The silence stretches on, until Will releases a long, heavy sigh. “Shit,” he murmurs under his breath. 

Ben is still staring at the floor in an unseeing daze, when Will breaks the silence.

“Man, this hurts like hell for me to say. I gotta admit, maybe some part of me doesn’t mind seeing you in pain. But it’s true you never tried to take her away without thinking of what she needs, so… you probably deserve to hear.”

Slowly, Ben looks up, though he still can’t quite bring himself to meet the other man’s eyes.

“You said there was no purpose or good that came from the time you spent with her. I…. God, I hate saying it, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true.”

Will leans forward in the chair, clasping his hands together tight in front of him as if trying to channel all his discomfort with the words into the press of his palms.

“She says your name in her sleep. All the time. More than I can count. I asked her once who ‘Ben’ was and she didn’t seem to know. But that didn’t stop her saying it.”

Ben doesn’t know what to think. He can’t think. Suddenly, the only thing he’s aware of are the droplets suddenly welling up high in his eyes. He stands abruptly from the chair and moves to the window. Standing in front of it, he clasps his hands together hard behind his back, trying to focus on the sting of fingernails digging into his palms, rather than the tracks of tears dripping down his face. He forces his body to remain still, doing everything he can to suppress the tremors which would betray his suddenly distraught state.

Rey calls out for him in her sleep, and he can never see her again.

Without looking at Ben, Will goes on, “She’s been painting more, too. You said you met her about a year and a half ago… it adds up. She’s sold sixteen pieces in the last year.”

Ben has never had the chance to see her work. He never tried to attend any of her shows or openings – the few he learned of – because Will would be there. There was never any chance for Rey to show him her studio or paintings. Now, there likely never will be. 

“Sorry,” Ben scrapes out. He swipes a hand roughly across his face to clear most of the tears away, shakes his head roughly in an attempt to clear them. 

“It just…. it isn’t fair,” Will is saying from somewhere behind him, voice slightly bitter but more helpless. “I’ve known her my whole life. Since she was seven. It’s not fair that you just waltz in here and suddenly have this unbreakable connection…”

“You think I don’t think the same fucking thing?” Ben grates out, turning away from the window now to face the other man, no matter how red his eyes may be. “You don’t think I wish every day that I hadn’t crossed paths with her sooner? What isn’t fair is that no matter what I do for her, you’re the only one she remembers.”

Will crosses his arms but says nothing, expression guarded and hard to read. His face stoic now, Ben swipes quickly at his eyes again as if the tears are a nuisance. 

“None of it is fair,” Will mumbles, looking down to where he rubs his hands across the denim of his jeans. “Not for her, either. Ever since the accident.”

Ben takes a slow, centering breath. “I never… never got to hear the details. The one time Rey mentioned it, she grew upset and didn’t want to talk about it.”

Will seems to chew his bottom lip, his expression conflicted. “Yeah. It’s hard for her to talk about.”

“Can she? Does she remember it?”

“It comes and goes, seems like.” Will sighs, dragging a hand through his air. “Look, I’m not trying to be a total asshole here. I understand you want to know. It’s just… it’s not my story to tell. It’s complicated and personal for her, and I still don’t think she’s fully worked through it. But… I can tell you what directly caused her condition was a car accident that knocked her unconscious. She was trapped in the wreck for a few minutes, and the seatbelt cut off her air. ”

For Ben to hear these words - it’s like a physical blow straight to his own head. He extends a shaking hand behind him, steadying himself against the window.

“It was an anoxic brain injury. Right afterwards, she had difficulty remembering what happened. Then, she started having a hard time remembering anything since. She was diagnosed with anterograde amnesia.”

Will keeps rubbing his palms along his knees, swallowing and wincing as if the words sting his mouth. Even though he lives with it – with the reality of her condition – he is nothing near inured to it. His voice turns brittle.

“She can learn some new habits and behaviors. Like some subconscious part of her memory finally retained how to get to her studio, after I walked the way with her at least a dozen times. But she can’t remember individual new events, names, or experiences.”

Ben thinks of Rey, smiling at him as she slid a single flower into the pocket of his suit jacket. He thinks of her grinning as she scooped up a giant spoonful of ice cream. He thinks of her winking at him, as she unhooked her bra. He thinks of blood and shattered glass and has to fight not to be ill. 

The part of him that had accepted the reality of her condition – that had resolved to let her be and not make his fragmentary presence a torment to her – that part of him is resigned. Of course a world where his mate cannot remember him would be so inescapably loathsome. 

But another part of him – the ancient Alpha part that roars to life each time Rey is warm and inviting and in a state of undress – cannot accept that this is simply the immutable way of the world. He could have done something. He is her mate. He is meant to protect and care for her. Ben feels down to his very essence that this is why he met her – it is why he lives. There must have been something he got wrong. Otherwise, he would have made sure she was never in that car to begin with. 

He has found her now. And the way Ben’s heart storms in his chest for her – there must be some healing to be done. The world cannot be immovable to the force of what her being inspires within his. 

The world transformed the day he met her. It can again.

“She does remember things,” Ben avers. “Maybe only subconsciously, as you said. But the neurological paths to create memories must still be there. I’ve seen her remember…”

Ben trails off, just conscientious enough to leave the words private.

_Where the spoons are in my kitchen. That I always have strawberry ice cream in the back of the freezer. How to turn my shower on. The way to slide her bottom lip so perfectly between mine._

“What?” Will prompts. When Ben looks at him, he finds Will looking focused – hopeful. 

Ben quietly clears his throat.

“She seems to remember small, automatic things, but it’s new learning all the same. She’ll remember there’s an Italian place on the corner, even though she doesn’t recall eating there.”

“Exactly, I’ve noticed that too – especially when she isn’t thinking about it. When she’s caught up in work, for example. She’ll be painting, and she’ll ramble off something that happened to her the week before, or without hesitating she’ll go straight to the closet where we store the paintbrushes she needs. It’s just… when she reaches consciously for memories since the accident, it’s like there’s a fog.”

“Even if the memories are there,” Ben adds, nodding and unable to suppress his hope.

“I could never be sure if it was just wishful thinking on my part. But perhaps the block in her memory is more… trauma related than permanent neurological damage,” Will thinks aloud – the words seeming to hang in the air with a physical weight.

Ben nods along as he moves to lean against his desk, hands pushed into his pockets. He has neither desire nor will to stop Will’s observations from bringing comfort. Ben might have long accepted that he’ll never get to see loving recognition for himself in Rey’s eyes – but simply the fact that she might someday find some kind of restoration brings Ben a taste of peace. 

_Everyday my life is stolen from me,_ she’d lamented on their last night together. Perhaps one day, she’ll reclaim that ownership. She’ll find her own control. With a lifelong friend at her side who helps her carry her past into each day of her present.

Then, Will speaks up again – though his voice is hesitant and shadowed with sadness.

“Listen. I’m going to say something that’s a little fucking crazy. I’ll probably deny it later, but I think I just have to let it out of my head. It’s been… haunting me and now meeting you has only made it harder to ignore.”

Ben keeps his face impassive as he watches the other man, listening openly. 

“Since I started to guess what’s been going on with her – since I realized it was always the same scent she came home with and I put together that it must be the “Ben” she talks about in her sleep… I can’t shake the thought that I… _shit._ ” 

Will sits back with a fast, almost violent motion in the chair. He looks away, his expression shuttered and dark. 

“That maybe I’m not giving her everything she needs. That maybe I can’t.”

Will stands with an abrupt, spasm of motion. He walks with jerking steps to the door, and Ben is sure he’s going to tug it open and walk straight through without so much as another look back.

But Will freezes, mere feet before the door. He doesn’t turn back to face Ben. He remains there, turned away, shoulders hunched and tensed. 

“Look – let’s not fuck around. I’m sure you’ve wondered about her heats.”

Ben flinches slightly. He does a whole lot more than wonder about them. They are the source of torturous yearning and endless agony. Not only within his own body, but that which he can feel radiating from Rey’s despite the distance between them. As if she’s right there beside him, but just beyond his ability to grasp. Just outside his reach to remedy. Instead, they each burn alone, and Ben finds himself more deeply singed after each one.

Will’s voice flattens as he goes on, “It was… kinda my worst fear for a while. That she’d spend a heat with you, and she might never come back after that. But she stayed. I help her through the best I can, the way I always have, ever since she first presented. The way it’s always seemed to be enough.

“Until now – until you. Knowing Rey had found her Alpha, even if she didn’t realize… it made me doubt everything. Made me start thinking that just keeping her from falling off the edge wasn’t the same as making her happy.

“I thought I was enough. I’d always been there and I thought I was good for her. But maybe I’d always just assumed being comfortable was the same as being in love.”

Will’s shoulders relax and open slightly, his head lifting. He seems to give a long, full-body sigh before he goes on. Still, he doesn’t turn to face Ben.

“The fact is, she’s been different since she met you. And even though I’ve tried to stop thinking about it… I can’t stop wondering what it would do for her – being with you. How it might help her.”

Ben gives a soft, incredulous laugh. Gaze dropping to the floor, he shakes his head.

“This whole time, I almost never let myself entertain the idea. I kept telling myself she was better off with you, with the person who keeps her past alive and who she always knows – has always known.”

“I’m her past, but you may be her future. What right do I have to keep that from her?”

Ben has to admit – he never thought about it in those terms. He never thought about the future they might have together as something that even could be lost. As something to fight for and preserve. As something real. 

Ben huffs a laugh under his breath. “I suppose it doesn’t do much good to stand around talking about her like this. She knows her own mind, despite all this.”

“Isn’t that the truth.”

“No matter how much we talk and try to figure things out…”

Will turns part way, his gaze near Ben but not quite fixed on him.

“She’ll be the one who chooses.”

Ben extends a hand to trace the patterns of wood along the surface of his desk. It’s humiliating, what he has to say. To this day, it never breaks his heart any less. But if Will is really proposing that all three of them come face-to-face to lay the cards on the table…

Ben makes every effort to keep his voice steady. 

“She won’t know me. If we speak to her together…”

Will is quiet for a long time. 

Then: “Do you really believe that?”

No, Ben really doesn’t want to believe it. He knows, each time they’re together, that her body knows him – that her instincts recognize him and put her at ease in his presence. Even the very first time they met, she looked at him with that warm depth in her eyes Ben will never forget. It had been strange for him too the first time – that innate, immediate tug of rightness and belonging. 

But even a year and a half later, that seems to be all that draws her to him. 

Ben doesn’t know if it’s enough. That’s why he let her go, after all. 

Will’s hands are balled at his sides, but he presses out a quiet, controlled tone. “There’s more than just… names and dates and faces. If there wasn’t… well, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t think my girlfriend longs for someone else.”

Ben has a hard time putting words to the chaos that rises in him. 

Gratification. Gratitude. Regret. Shame. Relief. Hope. 

One thing is clear to him: This all could have gone a lot differently, if Will loved Rey any less. 

Will puts his hand on the doorknob. 

“Come over tonight. We’ll talk. Seven o’clock?”

Ben nods - still struggling, still speechless. 

“You know where we live?”

Ben looks up, and whatever Will sees in Ben’s eyes makes his mouth twist in a grim smile. 

“Of course you do.”

Before Will opens the door to leave, Ben bites his tongue hard enough to force speech out. 

“Will.”

The other man hesitates, looking back only halfway. 

‘Thank you’ is what Ben thinks he should say. He hovers near it, but cannot quite push himself the whole way. 

“I’m glad she has you.”

Will lets out a single stab of something near laughter. One lone, incredulous _ha._

“Eh. No, you’re not.”

And then he leaves, and Ben gets no work done for the rest of the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know that chapter in one of the Twilight books (I think it was Breaking Dawn...?) when Edward talks to Jacob in the gist of 'She wants a family and I can't give her that, so like you can go ahead and sleep with her just to knock her up, I give permission.'
> 
> Yeah, that's what I DIDN'T want to do in this chapter. Writing this story has been a fine balancing act in many ways - between Rey being impaired but not helpless; Ben being caring but not controlling; their dynamic being defined by mutual agency rather than one being a caretaker and one being child-like. This was my goal especially in the chapters immediately upcoming. 
> 
> And yep, I upped the chapter count because 6 was just an estimate when I started posting and there's still plenty of fic left! :))
> 
> I continue tinkering with later scenes, so all of your thoughts and feedback are sOO valuable! You can also say hi on [tumblr](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/) or [twitter!](https://twitter.com/xoruffitup)
> 
> Take care, everyone. <3


	5. Then Because She Goes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been absolutely cherishing all the love and discussion in comments. <3 Right now, every bit of positivity and loving vibes is so very meaningful - I hope that's what I'm helping spread with this update.
> 
> I haven't done this for a few chapters now, so dropping the link again to [Somebody Else](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCQVvXOL6Hs) \- the song that within the span of a few minutes wove this whole idea together in my head. 
> 
> This one's a big one. Hope it delivers!

  
[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/49932358248/in/dateposted/)  


Ben approaches the bright townhouse Rey calls home as if in a dream. He never imagined he’d have cause to climb the steps – to ring the doorbell.

His heart has been pounding out a frantic rhythm of anxiety and disquiet all day. He hasn’t been able to fit together exactly what he hopes might come from this. It’s all too incredible. As if a wall he’d thought immovable has simply vanished – revealing a new reality Ben has no idea how to navigate. 

Will answers the door. He gives a slight nod, mouth unmoving. 

“Come on up.”

Ben swallows back a hundred anxious questions. 

_Does she know you’re having company?_

_Does she know this will be terribly difficult for her?_

_Does she know I never meant to cause her hurt?_

He follows Will up a narrow staircase, until Will opens the door into a small, bright flat and lets Ben in after him. 

There are flowers and overflowing greenery at every window. The kitchen is dated, but every inch covered with color and decorations. The living room couches are dented and well-loved. 

Rey is humming as she bends over one of the window boxes, leaning half out the window to reach the far corner with her watering can. 

For half a second, Ben panics. A surge rises within him to quickly turn and leave before she sees him. Before he breaks the simple peace of her life here. 

She’s dressed in a crop top and white pants, her hair messy. She is so intensely beautiful, Ben thinks for a second he must have dreamt every moment they shared. Every time he ever touched her. 

“Rey,” Will says gently, passing Ben to enter the room. “We have a guest.”

Rey lifts the watering can and turns from the window with a weightless smile. “Oh?”

Her eyes fix on Ben. And Ben, weak as he is, can not look away. 

He sees her sharp, off-balance intake of breath. He sees the way she seems to grow tense. The way her face clouds with a myriad of emotions that ought to be too much for one person to contain.

“Sorry,” she breathes – her automatic script. “Do I… do I know you?”

Despite his awareness of how closely Will looks between them, Ben cannot repress his usual, understanding nod. He finds himself slipping into the speech and actions like an actor on stage – for the play he knows well by heart. 

“Yes, but it’s okay if you don’t remember.” He gives her just a small smile. “I’m Ben.”

“I…” Rey swallows, shifts the watering can from hand to hand. “Rey.”

Will seems somewhat surprised. In what way, Ben can’t tell. Perhaps he’d thought Ben was lying about Rey not knowing him. Or perhaps he wasn’t prepared for how visibly moved Rey is by Ben’s appearance – even if in some way beyond her conscious awareness. 

Will touches her shoulder, then takes the watering can from her hands. 

“Why don’t we all sit down? Ben is going to remind you how you know him, and the three of us will talk a little. If that’s okay with you?” 

Rey looks at Will with questions and what might be a bit of accusation in her eyes for catching her off guard like this. 

“Fine.”

Will puts away the watering can, while Ben comes into the living room and sits down stiffly on a chair across from the couch. Rey perches at the edge of the couch cushions, her eyes glued to Ben. 

Will takes the spot beside Rey, distanced just enough that he’s not touching her. 

“Rey.” She forces herself to pull her gaze away from Ben as Will reaches over to take one of her hands between his own. When she looks at him, she bites her lip as if in silent appeal for clarity. “Before we say anything, I just… I want you to know that no matter what happens, no matter what we talk about, I’m not angry. We can be honest. And I’ll understand.”

A touch of frustration creeps into Rey’s expression. “Well, thanks for that but I _don’t_ understand.”

Will sits back slightly, keeping Rey’s hand in his. Slightly unwillingly, he looks over to Ben. 

“Go ahead,” he mutters. 

Ben takes a deep breath as Rey’s eyes settle on him again – sharp and inquisitive. 

First, he finds himself speechless. There are no words in the entirety of language to convey what she is to him. To explain how it feels when she’s in his arms, or simply when she looks at him. How the entirety of his existence refines down to those moments when she whispers his name. When she calls him Alpha. 

Then, there are plenty of words. 

Ben shifts on the seat, leaning forward and holding Rey’s gaze.

“The last time you saw me was a little over a month ago. It was early evening and you saw me outside the bakery. I… didn’t plan on stopping you that time, I was just going to walk by. But I could see you were watching me, and I couldn’t help walking closer. 

“You asked if I’d bought one of your paintings recently. I said no, but we started talking, just like we always seem to. You asked where I was going, and when I said ‘home,’ you came with me.”

Rey begins to stiffen now – perhaps as some recollection filters back, or perhaps simply because her boyfriend is sitting right beside her. 

Will, for his part, stares resolutely at the floor, steeling himself for what he knows is coming. 

“Go on,” he urges, and Ben does. 

“You’d just come from the studio, and you were covered in paint. You went to take a shower. When I brought you clean clothes, you told me to join you. Afterwards, we made love in the bedroom.”

Ben says it matter-of-factly, not looking anywhere but her face. Rey’s eyes are wide, but in something other than shock.

“Later, we shared a lasagna and you found the ice cream I always keep for you in my freezer. You noticed a flower in the kitchen. It’s the one I kept from the first time we met, over a year ago. It’s the one you gave me. You grew upset and disoriented when you saw it, though I don’t think you remembered exactly why. I was worried you seemed faint, so I brought you to bed. You… cried for a while. I didn’t know exactly what was wrong, so I just held you. And you… you called me…”

“Alpha.” 

Rey’s voice joins his in perfect unison. They stare at each other across the living room, breathing deep and as one. A million thoughts seem to be moving behind her eyes, though Ben cannot recognize whether she is seeing the same things he does. 

They’re reminded they’re not alone by the sound of a sharp hiss from Will as Rey squeezes his hand too tightly.

Rey blanches. “I’m sorry, Will,” she says hurriedly – the words light but loaded.

“It’s okay,” he says quickly, brushing off the double meaning. He is still shaken by how very easily he finds he can picture it - Rey crossing the room to slip into Ben’s arms. Smiling a weightless smile up at him before she kisses his lips. Part of Will cannot deny understanding how this went so far.

Rey visibly gathers herself, her shoulders straightening as she looks quickly between Will and Ben. 

“You both – you’ve never met before?”

Will shakes his head, somehow managing to look in Ben’s direction but clear past him. 

“No. Just for the first time this morning, when we thought it would be best to talk openly about all this.”

Rey’s expression is serious and focused, a tiny crease between her eyebrows as she attempts to line up all the pieces in her head.

“We’ve been seeing each other for how long?” she asks Ben. 

“It’s been a year and a half now since we first met. We spent time together every couple weeks – when I’d get desperate to see you. Even though you didn’t remember the last time, it would always feel familiar right away.”

Rey doesn’t question. She makes no excuses, gives no alternate versions of Ben’s account which would paint it any differently. She simply squeezes Will’s hand as she grapples with what she knows to be true. It should horrify her – what she’s done. Leaving her boyfriend to share a veritable stranger’s bed instead. 

Only, Ben is no stranger. She didn’t recognize him when he appeared in the apartment, but sitting here across from him and listening to his words – their truth is clear to her, as is his honesty. 

“But… you said I haven’t seen you since over a month ago. Why so long?”

Ben frowns, slumping in his seat slightly. He knows perfectly well all the reasons why he thought it best to stop seeing her. But being in the same room with her again – all he feels is the hot shame and regret that he could not provide her what she begged of him. That he broke his promises to her, when he left early that morning and let her wake up alone – all memory of her mate evaporated into the night. 

“I tried to put into perspective what would be best for you in the long term, instead of just what I wanted. When we were together, it felt… like nothing I can describe. But sometimes, feeling all that left both of us miserable. You especially, when you’d realize you would lose all memory of it by morning. We couldn’t remain in that world together. And so… I thought it would be better if you stayed in the world you have now – the one you know and always remember. That would be better than trying to keep pulling you to a place where there can never be a future.”

“Did I…. did I ever ask to stay?”

Ben looks down, his chest hurting.

“Yes. The last time, you did. That’s why I…. I couldn’t bear having to break a promise to you ever again.”

Rey doesn’t look angry or disappointed – not when she cannot remember asking it of him. She simply looks… lost. 

Ben hasn’t touched her in weeks, and suddenly he aches with it. 

At her side, Will gives Rey’s hand a gentle tug until she looks up at him. 

“Rey. I won’t ignore or play dumb about what this means.” His throat moves as he swallows with difficulty. His eyes are gentle but determined as he focuses on Rey, and Ben wishes he weren’t intruding on what suddenly seems a private moment. 

“I get that if things were different… if you knew all the time that Ben is out there and so close, you might have made some different choices.”

“Will, I-” 

“Let me finish.”

There is a lot Will has told himself throughout the past year in attempt to find some reassurance.

_She can’t help it. Maybe she wouldn’t want it anyway. Maybe she’d resent the implication of biology erasing her own will. Maybe she’d still choose me._

But he has had enough time to see the folly in most of those imaginings. He knows those comforts must remain private, for him alone. 

“Ben said he stopped seeing you because there couldn’t be any future. But maybe that’s only true if I keep holding onto you.”

Rey looks frightened – as if the whole world is tilting out from beneath her feet. Will rubs his thumb across the back of her hand as he keeps talking.

“All I’m saying is… I want you to be free, Rey. I don’t want to keep you trapped here in memories of your childhood, just because you think it’s all you have. There is more for you out there. More beyond this life with me. Just because it’s all you can remember… that doesn’t mean it should be all you ever know.”

He takes a deep breath and pushes on, even as Rey’s chin begins to quiver.

“You know how much I’ve always loved you, and I know that you’ve loved me too. But… some part of you is meant to be with him, and it always will be. I – I don’t want to lose you, but… since I realized what was going on, I haven’t been able to stop feeling wrong. I keep wondering if it might change things, if it might help you, to be with your mate.

“So that’s why I told Ben to come here tonight. We want you to know everything we know. And… it should be your choice – what part of yourself you want to act on.”

The room goes very quiet, and Rey sits very still. She stares at the window box – at the flowers she somehow remembers to water each morning. She doesn’t know the desires of her own heart, but at least she knows to plant her lilies in the spring.

Both men try not to watch her too closely, but seconds have never stretched so interminably long. It escapes neither of their notice when tears well in Rey’s eyes, though her expression remains glazed and unmoving.

“You think I’d get better, with Ben?”

She doesn’t look at either of them, her voice small but still clinging to stability. 

Will looks at Ben, unsure, and Ben forces his own mouth open. 

“I’m not sure. Neither of us are. It’s a possibility.”

Rey shakes her head just slightly, as the water in her eyes begins to flood over. 

“I don’t…. I can’t – it’s all too much…”

Ben’s muscles tense to go to her on instinct, but Will pulls her close right away. 

“It’s all fine. I know it’s overwhelming… We can take all the time you need. We can have this conversation as many times as you need.”

The thought of sitting through all this again hits Ben like a blow to the head. But he would. As many times as she needs. 

Even as Will holds her, Rey’s gaze remains fixed on the flowers at the window. She merely blinks through the tears running from her eyes, making no move to clean them away. 

“Can I, maybe…” she starts, hesitates. 

“Go ahead,” Will urges softly.

Ben desperately wants to look away but he can’t, for fear of missing a single whispered word. 

“Can I just… spend some time with Ben? More than one night? If he reminds me of all this, reminds me you know everything…. then maybe afterwards I’ll know what to do.”

Will nods, his expression carefully inscrutable as he pulls back from Rey. 

“Of course. That’s a good plan.”

The corners of Rey’s lips are wet with her tears, but her face remains frozen in its strange calm. 

“Sorry,” she whispers to Will, almost too soft for Ben to catch. 

“Don’t be. There’s nothing for it.”

She darts a look around the room. It seems purposeful that she keeps her gaze away from Ben. She clears her tears with a precise, efficient swipe of her hands. 

“I’ll pack a few things.”

While the sounds of Rey moving around the bedroom fill the small apartment, Will and Ben look everywhere but each other. 

Finally, Ben drags himself to his feet and fishes his phone from his pocket. He opens the contacts screen and holds it out to Will. 

“I’ll let you know how she is. When she’s…. ready to come home.”

Will smiles a small, utterly humorless smile. “Right.”

He enters his number, hands the phone back. For a second, his hand freezes against Ben’s palm. 

“We both know she would have stayed, if you let her. I know you didn’t do it for me, but… thanks, all the same.”

Ben’s throat twists up tight. He shares none of Will’s apparent certainty, and every feeling within him seems impossibly complicated. 

“Thanks for finding me this morning. I wondered about talking to you, now and then, but I never thought…”

“That I’d be this much of a sucker?” Will supplies with a hollow laugh. 

Ben is saved from having to respond by Rey’s voice in the doorway. 

“I’m ready.”

Will stands from the couch. 

“I gave Ben my number. He’ll let me know how you’re doing.”

Rey nods, drops her bag, then crosses the living room to him. She kisses the corner of his mouth and briefly presses herself to him. Will gives her a short, tight squeeze. 

“I’m always here, Rey.”

“I know.”

Ben picks up Rey’s bag for her. He can’t bring himself to meet Will’s eyes again, as he follows Rey out of the apartment and down to the street. 

*

Outside, Rey is quiet, but her hand immediately finds Ben’s and grips tight. 

“I’ve been to your house, right?”

Still, she seems to be looking everywhere but at Ben. Still, the strange mask of calm seems to linger over her expression. 

Ben nods. “Yeah, a few times.”

“Take me.”

Ben firmly tamps down the baser response her words incite in him. Without releasing her hand, he steps to the edge of the sidewalk and hails a cab. 

In the backseat, her bag down between his feet, Rey fits seamlessly to his side. 

At his front door, Rey hovers close as Ben unlocks and opens his home to her. He lets her pass inside first, then follows with her bag. The moment the door closes behind them and Ben lowers her bag to the floor, all of the guarded control Rey had been pouring all her energy into melts away. She whirls, her expression breaking in two, and molds herself against Ben. 

She’s already crying as Ben wraps her as tightly in his arms as he possibly can. She hiccups, gasping for breath as the tears rush up and keep coming. Rey presses her face deep against Ben’s chest, nuzzling back and forth slightly as if his scent can stop the tears. Their bond makes her pain his own. 

“It’s okay, Rey,” Ben murmurs, making every effort to keep his voice calm and soothing – not to let it betray his distress. 

He doesn’t know what else to say, so he scoops her up from the floor and carries her into the living room. He places her on the couch, wraps her in a blanket, then sits down close to cradle her in his arms again. 

Her fingers are desperate and determined, as they cling to his shirt. She presses her face tight to his neck, swallowing down lungfuls of his scent even as she shakes with sobs. 

“Not fair,” she murmurs, words broken. “It’s not fair.”

Ben realizes at that moment that he is afraid. More scared than he’s ever been in his life - that she might resent him and this indomitable pull between them. That she’ll come to hate it and him, for stealing her from the life she had.

Tamping down the despair threatened by such thoughts, Ben noses against her neck until he finds the gland behind her ear. He hums against the skin, feeling her body begin to relax and unravel in his arms. He lets out a soft rumble, then presses small, gentle kisses to the spot. 

“Ben,” Rey whispers, sounding weary and imploring. 

He keeps his mouth there, until she falls asleep. 

When Ben carries her to bed, he molds himself to the shape of her beneath the blankets. Listening to her finally relaxed breathing, he trails one hand tentatively and reverently along her side – from shoulder all the way to hip. Even in the limited time they’ve spent together, they have done everything. Ben has made love to her every conceivable way outside of a heat, and he has touched and kissed every inch of her. 

Still, she is no less miraculous. Ben will never forget. Entering her body was like knowing sunlight for the very first time.

Ben lays his arm gently across her, letting the sound of her breathing and the warmth of her scent soothe him. 

“I don’t know what you will choose,” he whispers, words barely brushing the back of her neck. “I don’t know what you’ll think when you wake – if you will even know me at all. But if you can hear me… somewhere off in sleep where you sometimes call for me… Know that I’m here. I’m here with you, Rey.” 

He curls closer to her, knowing this is what he’s meant for. 

But Rey… _Rey._ She is untamed. She is vast and impossible to hold between two hands. 

She is his Omega, but Ben cannot imagine her ever being tethered in place.

He is simple and predictable - but for her, and so the pardon comes easily. Still, he murmurs as she sleeps, “I am nothing but my love for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I knOW, feel free to pile on me in the comments about causing these poor babies so much angst. ;___; Rey has made some small decision, but we (nor Ben) can't know for sure yet what it means. The next chapter has Rey and Ben back alone together, trying to figure out exactly what it means.
> 
> I live for all your thoughts and feedback as I continue to edit later chapters. Promise I'll be back soon with more!
> 
> -> [Tumblr](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/)  
> -> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/xoruffitup)  
> -> :) to all


	6. I'm In Love, I'll Say It Twice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So many conflicting feelings went into writing this part. There's relief, sadness, but also so much love and joy. I so look forward to seeing how you all bounce off it, and what shines through the strongest. 
> 
> You'll see a few direct calls in this part to [the song that initially provided inspiration.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCQVvXOL6Hs) I couldn't help myself...

  
[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/49932358248/in/dateposted/)  


When she wakes, Ben is prepared for the worst. He is prepared for her to look at him with the questioning, confused eyes of a stranger.

Rey does wake with questions in her eyes, but they are not for Ben. 

Where they lay facing each other, Rey looks directly into Ben’s eyes as she softly asks, “I remember… Will said something strange. He said… he didn’t want to lose me but… but everything felt wrong. Why?”

Ben lifts a hand to cup Rey’s face. He looks between the peerless pools of her eyes, his own shining with the clarity he has known since the first time he laid eyes on her. 

“Will knows what we are. You and I. For your sake, he didn’t want to ignore it. He knows we are meant to be mated, and you are meant to be mine.”

Ben cannot parse her expression, as her mind processes through the remnants of sleep. He strokes his thumb along her bottom lip, his gaze roving from her eyes to her mouth and back again. He waits. 

Finally, Rey presses closer to him. “I know you somehow.”

Ben lets his forehead kiss hers. 

“Ben,” he softly supplies to her. Her lips slip slightly apart, as if to taste his whisper.

Her voice rasps, “I can’t remember everything… can’t remember how I know, but… this is your bed. I’ve been here before. And there’s one thing I know for sure...”

Her hands move instinctively to his chest, her fingers spreading tight against Ben’s sleep shirt. 

“In your bed, you should be inside of me.”

Breath punches out from Ben’s lungs. Their eyes never leaving each other’s, their fingers collide and tangle as pants and underwear are shed. Rey’s hands grapple at Ben’s shoulders and chest as he slides a hand along her thigh and brings it to hook over his hip. His gaze remains lost in hers, as he finds his way within her.

Ben watches as she takes in a deep, shuddering breath that seems to illuminate her from the inside. She breathes out a fluttering gasp, her eyes flickering with deep, sated pleasure as her inner muscles tremble to bring all of him inside herself. 

And then her fingers clutch at him hard enough to sting. Her leg tightens over his hip and she presses herself tight to him. 

“Don’t move. Don’t go away. Stay right here. Stay inside.”

He trembles slightly with the effort – with the building pressure in the sweet grip of her body. But he only pulls her tighter to himself, presses himself as deep as he’ll possibly go, and nods into her shoulder. 

“I’ll stay right here. As long as you want me.”

*

Rey sleeps for a long time. In the morning, Ben shoots a quick email off from his phone. He won’t be coming into the office this week. Taking care to move softly, Ben slides from bed, dresses, and goes to make breakfast. 

In the kitchen, he grips the handle of the spatula perhaps a bit too tightly. 

Rey is in his house. It’s morning, she’s here, and there’s no reason for Ben to have to leave her. At least – not for now. Not yet. 

Wondering what she’ll think, how she’ll react when she wakes, an idea occurs to him. He bustles off into his home office for a moment while the pan sizzles on the stove. 

Ben is standing at the stove again when he feels, more than hears, Rey’s bare footfalls in the hallway. He turns just in time to see her appear in the kitchen. Her hair is unkempt and her eyes are still sleepy, but she has on one of Ben’s flannels, the buttons only half done and the shirt falling just to her bare thighs. Ben realizes she must have remembered the drawer to find them in, and feels his heart twist. 

With no small degree of apprehension, Ben sets the spatula down and moves a few steps towards her. She watches him with something between bewilderment and amazement. 

Ben stops still a good distance away. 

“You might not remember, but you, Will, and I had a talk yesterday.”

Her eyes widen slightly, as she sucks in a sudden breath.

“He knows you’re here. He wanted to give you the chance to decide for yourself… who you want to be with. So, you came here with me to decide.”

Her mouth remains parted on an exhalation as she processes. Unsure whether to go to her, Ben does his best to put her at ease first. To make this, perhaps, a bit less difficult for her. 

“I’m not sure how much this will help, but I’ve put these up around the house, for however long you stay.” 

Ben gestures to the yellow sticky note he’d stuck on the fridge, then the one on the doorframe just beside where Rey stands. 

She walks to each of them, then begins following the trail of bright yellow and pink sticky notes throughout Ben’s house. On the mirrors, cabinets, doors, and tabletops. 

_This is Ben’s house, where you’ve been several times before._

_Tell Ben, if you want to go home._

_Call Will, if you want him to pick you up._

_You met Ben over a year ago._

_You’ve been seeing Ben for the last year and a half._

_Will knows about Ben. He understands._

_Will wants you to choose the life you live._

_Ben wants you to do whatever makes you happy._

Rey follows each of the notes, letting their words sink in - complicating and clarifying the murky swirl of recollections circling in her head. Sensations, voices, hardship, kisses, tears…

While she seeks them all out, Ben takes the spatula in hand again and returns to flipping pancakes. He drops chocolate chips into each one, just as he knows Rey likes. He does his best to focus on placing four chips in each pancake at precisely equal distance from each other, rather than worrying about what Rey will do, after these few days pass…

He distracts himself thoroughly enough that he barely hears Rey’s bare feet pad into the kitchen again. He’s just finished flipping the pancakes currently sizzling in the pan, when her arms wind around him from behind. 

Even fully spread, her small hands barely cover half of his chest. She squeezes his torso, as he feels her press her face into the back of his shirt.

Clutched in her hand, Ben recognizes the single orange note he’d written - the one that had been stuck to the bathroom mirror.

 _Ben loves you._

She squeezes him even more tightly. 

“Will knows everything?” she asks softly. 

Ben doesn’t try to turn around in her hold. He answers in the broadest sense, relieved that it’s all the truth. 

“Yes. He knows.”

Silence stretches, so complete they can both hear the sizzle of the batter in the pan, until Ben lifts the browned pancakes and slides them onto a waiting plate. 

Then, she asks in a voice still softer, “Is it true?”

Ben takes a deep breath, stopping himself from dislodging her hold to turn around. Instead, he focuses his gaze towards the kitchen window - towards the single dried daisy standing in the vase. 

“It’s true, Rey. All of it.”

He covers one of her hands with his own. Behind him, he hears the small, concealed sound of her tears. 

Her forehead presses close against his shoulder.

*

Later in the day, they go back to bed. Rey dozes, and Ben strokes his fingers through her hair. 

When she wakes, she remains relaxed even as her eyes blink slowly in attempt to make sense of things. 

“Will knows you’re here,” Ben murmurs to her. “You’re safe with me. It’s Ben, your Alpha.”

Rey sleepily reaches to touch Ben’s cheek. Her fingers feel the shape of his face as she slowly comes awake. 

“Ben,” she says, tasting the name on her tongue. Savoring it. 

Ben nods in affirmation, without shifting away from her touch. Her fingers trace the planes and angles of which he is composed.

“Ben.”

Ben smiles, and she touches it for a while longer.

*

Rey cries. A lot. Ben spends the second day thinking Will was wrong about everything. Rey isn’t meant to be separated from him. 

Then, she starts flaring into intermittent bursts of anger. 

“I never asked him to give up anything for me. I never asked to move in with him. Hell, I never asked him to waste his life.”

“I doubt that’s how Will thinks of it.”

Rey scoffs, even as she sniffs back fresh tears.

“He’s always been that way. Doing more than he should – even when we were kids.” Rey’s voice falters off as tears flood her eyes again. “But I never asked to owe him so much.”

“Shh,” Ben crosses the kitchen to wrap her in his arms. Rey’s fingers bunch in the fabric across Ben’s back as she holds on tightly, trying to stifle the next wave of guilt. 

Ben holds her long enough that the sunlight has changed when she draws back.

“I-I’m sorry, Ben,” she murmurs, though with a sniff that’s more frustrated with herself than mournful. She keeps her gaze low. “We’re finally together and you’re probably wondering why I can’t be happier about it right now.”

Ben doesn’t follow. He didn’t expect her to be happy during this period. He knows how hard it would be for her, in the moments when her conflict is clear and towering.

He feels as if he’s somehow lagging a great distance behind.

“You… haven’t said if you’re staying.” 

At that, Rey looks up and gives him a strange look.

“I must have said….”

When Ben simply shakes his head and continues watching her with wide eyes, she blanches, straightening up as she fills with both tender understanding and self-loathing regret.

“I thought it was obvious. Of course I am. I thought we both knew, since the beginning…”

She looks at Ben, taking in the shock painting his features, and her face grows desolate. 

Ben’s head spins. He’s not sure he’s heard right. It can’t be… surely it can’t be that easy, that painlessly quick and simple for her to say such a thing. For her to say she’s going to stay - that they’ll never have to be parted again. 

The mere idea has seemed untouchable, since the very first time it formed in Ben’s mind. Even for all the dreams and longing and love he lauded it with, the idea had never seemed one that could really cross into the boundary of this world.

And she speaks it. So miraculously easily. And yet, she seems so sad as she says it...

“Ben, I… I’m so sorry. None of it’s fair - to you, or to us.”

Ben immediately flashes back to how she’d broken down the moment they arrived. How she’d kept everything inside until Ben could hold her in private, and then how she’d mourned: _It’s not fair._

It had sent fear through him like paralysis, as he heard in her words the terrible prospect of dissatisfaction with this life.

“It isn’t fair that we lost so much time. That there’s so much I don’t remember… so many details of you that are lost to me. That you had to suffer for all this time, and I didn’t – didn’t even _know._ I didn’t even know you were alone…”

Even as Ben’s head and heart continue racing to catch up, to work through the myriad waves of shock rolling through him, he speaks automatically. The same lines he has told himself, every single day.

“I didn’t resent it, Rey. You had a life that was happy, and it… it happened to be without me. You were cared for and you… you smiled so much and you belonged to somebody else…”

Ben shakes his head - the movement an unconscious show of reinforcing his words, but in practice, only a slide deeper into the hurricane building within him.

“I didn’t mind. I didn’t, Rey. I didn’t…”

Even with that sad, profound shine to her eyes, the very corners of her mouth tease a tender, understanding smile. She steps closer, and reaches to cradle Ben’s face between her hands.

He continues repeating the same words - _I didn’t_ \- lost in the truth of what he’s feeling and unable to face what lies beyond.

Until she brushes her fingertips over his words, and murmurs, “Ben. It’s okay to want something for yourself. It’s okay.”

He goes silent, his eyes wide and wet, shocked and fixed only on her. He stares at her with the absorption of a man who knows nothing else in the world.

Little by little, her smile grows under the force of his attention.

“Maybe I want you to be selfish for me. Just for me.”

Ben’s lips drift apart, then together, then apart again. His jaw trembles. 

Every moment since he met her, he has had to be strong. He has had to tear himself open and sew his own heart shut again - more times than he could count. He has spent so many agonizing nights alone - the worst always just after seeing her, after tasting a single fleeting drop of the happiness he’d been so sure was never meant for him.

“I didn’t…. _Rey,_ I… I didn’t know how I would get through the day sometimes. When you belonged to somebody else. When you were gone. When you didn’t know me. I didn’t know how I could bear it… I didn’t know how… When you belonged to _somebody else._ ”

Rey guides him down into her arms.

“Ben.”

He hears her murmur his name like that - a brief, loving statement that seeks nothing, causes no pain, it simply gives sound to the light within her. 

Light that is - finally - shining upon Ben.

For the first time, he sinks into her completely. He feels all his carefully-crafted control and his painstakingly-constructed walls crumbling apart, and finally all his desires are undiluted. He is refined, pure, and he is with her. 

His knees rest on the kitchen floor, his arms tight around her. Her grip on him is fierce and strong, where she holds his head and shoulders clutched to her chest. 

Later, Ben doesn’t know whether he shed tears. All he knows is he’d drowned himself in her scent - resolute, welcoming, and amorous - and then in her voice as she spoke promises that finally, they could keep. 

“I’m here, Ben. I’m never going away. I’m here. I’m yours. Only ever yours.”

*

Ben is afraid to let her go to sleep. Naked in his arms in bed, she smiles at him as she stretches. 

“I won’t forget what matters, Ben. It’s impossible to forget how you make me feel. This certainty that this is where I’m meant to be.”

She traces along his jaw, brushes a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“I might ask questions. About what was said, how I ended up here. But I will know you, and I will feel all the same things I feel right now.”

She twines her fingers with his, brings his hand up against her heart. 

“Here - I will know you. Even if you have to explain first.” 

Ben squeezes her hand, tugging her still a little closer. Sensing the edge of his apprehension, Rey’s expression grows earnest. 

“I’m sorry for all the things you have to repeat. I’m sorry I can’t always… pick up in the right places.”

Ben shakes his head. He leans close to kiss where their hands are entwined, just above her heart. 

“Don’t be sorry. I trust you. So please trust me, when I say I’m never letting you go ever again. That I will always, always be here with you, every time you wake up. I’ll always be here to remind you. I don’t care how many times it takes.”

“What if….” her voice goes soft - uncharacteristically hesitant. She burrows closer to him, their clasped hands pressed between their bodies. There is quiet fear in her voice, “What if it never changes? What if I… never get better?”

Ben curls his free arm around her to tuck her closer. 

“There’s nothing to heal.”

Rey hides against his chest for a long time. Ben is sure she must have fallen asleep by now, with how she relaxes in his arms down to the very last muscle. 

But then her voice comes - clear and sure and unforgettable. 

“I needed Will for a long time. But Ben, I…. I love you.”

Ben had no idea. Until this moment, he had no idea that this is what he’d been waiting to hear. 

It had taken time to know he loved her. He’d felt the gentle, adoring warmth from the first time their eyes met. From that very first smile. But love like this is more than simply the magnetism of hormones. 

It’s the way she always nestles herself in closer, when he holds her. It’s the way she beams and flirts. Hell, it’s even the way her brow furrows as she struggles to place him. It took time to learn her, before the force of it all culminated in the revelatory conviction of love. 

_I would love you. If I could remember… I know I would._ That’s what she’d once said to him, and it had pierced him clean through. He’d thought it impossible for her to collect enough little bits and pieces of him to amount to anything momentous. 

And as he feels their bond thrumming bright and clear between them, he knows she would never speak the words unless she knew their truth. Unless they carry all the same significance as when he uses them.

_I love you - for me, you are the only one._

She falls asleep then, and for the first time, Ben feels neither loss nor fear. He barely remembers the taste of either.

*

Rey asks fewer questions the next day. She traces her fingers over the letters of Ben’s notes throughout the house. She seems calmer.

Ben loses track of her when he has to take a conference call in his home office. He looks for her after, and finds her in the living room. 

“Rey?”

She turns, an untroubled smile on her face. Her eyes crinkle a bit at the corners, and Ben swears she glows.

She’s holding something in her hand. Rather than a ball-point pen, it’s a Sharpie marker. 

Ben comes nearer to where she sits on the couch, and she holds out her arm so he can see what she’s written there herself. 

_Ben. Mate. Home._

Ben is speechless as she stands and comes near. She looks down at the words with no small amount of affection. 

“This is all I have to remember. All that matters.”

There is… so much for Ben to take in. So much for him to feel. 

Latching on to the first place where he can find a foothold, he asks weakly, “Mate?”

He has barely used the word aloud to her. Though he has thought it - known it - for so long it has already become a part of him.

Rey nods easily, smiling the smile that ruins the sun for him. She puts her arms up around his neck and grins, everything suddenly so easy. So clear.

“Of course. When I go into heat.”

Ben’s head spins - he swears he might be a moment away from passing out. 

Rey knows she loves him. She knows he loves her.

Rey knows she wants to spend her heat with him.

Rey knows she wants him to mate her. 

“Are you sure?” he asks weakly – only because it seems the right thing to say. Despite how he can feel her body calling out to him; can feel her incessant craving for the same completion he spends every single day imagining.

Rey nuzzles into him - her lips brushing against the gland beside Ben’s jaw. 

“I’d let you do it now, only I know it will feel even more perfect during our first heat together.”

 _Our first heat_ \- and only one of many firsts.

Ben trembles a little as he pulls her close - as he draws a hand up her back to rest over her mating gland. It’s a little hard for him to breathe, past the dawning knowledge that soon, he will make the claiming bite. She will truly be his - as was always meant to be.

Ben’s voice is hushed, tucked into the slope of her neck. “I was always so careful around this.” His fingertips circle across her mating gland, and he feels suddenly hot as she shivers against him. “Made sure not to leave marks.”

Rey kisses his jaw, all the way up to his cheek. Her voice is a soft, pleading rasp near his ear, “I want your mark, Ben. Want your teeth in me and your scent always, always inside me…”

“ _Always_ , Rey.”

Rey pulls back just enough to glance at the Sharpie words along her arm. 

“I had the thought to get it tattooed. But once we’re mated… maybe I won’t need it.”

Ben reaches to trace the black letters along her skin. Seeing those words there puts something at peace within him that had long been restless and mournful. But at the same time, he thinks he would always prefer Rey’s skin remain unmarked - just as she is.

Ben slides his hand down to link their fingers together. 

He kisses just between her eyebrows. 

“Maybe you won’t.”

* 

Ben makes a show of grumbling in complaint when Rey hijacks the remote. She turns on her trashy reality show with glee. 

“Don’t lie. Deep down, you love it.”

Rey leans back on the couch, swinging her feet up into Ben’s lap. He lets out a theatrical sigh as his hands begin rubbing her ankles.

“Maybe. _Deep_ down.”

Rey, for her part, seems distracted.

“Ben?” she asks during the first commercial break. He looks over, and sees the afternoon light blossoming across her skin in gold. “Can we have flower boxes at the windows?”

Ben’s heart aches in a way wholly unfamiliar. In a way that, strangely enough, makes him smile.

“We can have whatever you want.”

With his fingers, he massages the instep of her left foot. 

“We don’t even have to stay here. When we’re mated…” (he has to pause for a moment to catch his breath around the word) “...we can find a brand new place - one that’s ours. That we picked together.”

Rey wiggles her toes in his lap. 

“But I like it here. It smells like you.”

“If we find a new place, we’d make it smell like us.”

She holds his gaze for a while, until her smile makes it Ben’s turn to forget all else.

At the next commercial break, Ben takes his turn to ask a question.

“Hey, Rey?”

“Hmm?”

“Would you show me your studio sometime? And some of your artwork?”

Rey stares at him, eyes wide.

“I’ve never showed you?”

Ben shakes his head. 

“We never had time.”

“Oh. Oh, Ben. Of course I will.”

*

Soon enough, Ben learns how to wake her. When she shows the first signs of stirring, he learns to lean over and gently kiss her face. That way, the comfort is the first thing she feels, rather than a blank. 

Then come the reassurances. The reminder: “It’s Ben.” The explanation: “You chose to stay here. You’re meant to be here.”

The difference may be slight - hell, it may even be imagined - but Ben swears it doesn’t take quite as long from day to day for her waking incertitude to clarify into the sleepy, loving smile Ben is coming to recognize for his own. 

*

By the fourth day, Ben knows he ought to say something to Will. For what must be the tenth time, Ben stares at the open text conversation on his phone. Ben had sent exactly one minimal message each day. 

_She cried a lot this morning, but afternoon got better._

_She woke upset today, but calmed when I explained._

_Calm day, she seems alright._

Will had replied only once, with a single “Thanks.”

Ben’s fingers are hovering above the phone screen when Rey glances over and catches sight of the name. 

Rey chews her bottom lip, thinking and searching her own feelings. 

“I guess I should start collecting my stuff from…. well, his place now.”

Her words are even, but softened with care and delicacy. 

Ben looks at her - the finality of her choice still shaking him deep. 

“I haven’t even been brave enough to tell him yet,” Ben admits. “That you’re not… coming back.”

Rey turns to him with a look that is somehow both tender and resigned. 

“I’m sure he already knows.”

Later, Ben’s hands tremble just the slightest bit as he scrawls his full name and address in ballpoint pen along Rey’s wrist. 

_Ben. Mate. Home._ is only barely visible now, in lingering smudges of Sharpie.

He realizes his apprehension dips firmly into fear, though he voices none of it. 

Rey, of course, senses enough. When he’s finished, she reaches up to cup his cheek. 

“I’m coming right back, Ben. Just going to collect my clothes.”

“Right,” Ben breathes. He turns his face against her palm and presses a kiss there. “Okay.”

She returns a little over two hours later, with two full suitcases of her belongings. Ben sags in relief when he sees her through the window getting out of a cab. Then he hurries to the door to help fill their home with her things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SHE LOVES HIM AND BB BEN FINALLY KNOWS IT <33
> 
> So they're together for good now, but the story is hardly over! How will it affect Rey and her condition when they finally mate? Will Will (hehe) still be in her life? Will Ben think of new ways to find Rey care or treatment? And what exactly happened to her to cause her condition, anyway?
> 
> All this and more, still to come! Hope you all stick with me, and please do share your thoughts on this chapter! :)


	7. I Want To Kiss Your Neck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The comments and love you all have been leaving has truly been the bright spot in life lately. We're moving into the next part of the story now and we've got something pretty major in this chapter... Can't wait for everyone's response!

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/49932358248/in/dateposted/)

Ben’s phone buzzes - a welcome distraction from all the contracts he still has to review this afternoon.

_No good?? : (_

With a crooked picture of a still-wet canvas on an easel between the wide windows of Rey’s studio.

_I think it’s stunning. All the blues are so different and add a lot of texture._

_Ugh I don’t like it. You like everything so your opinion’s worthless._

A moment later, she sends a string of hearts. 

Ben smiles to himself as he returns to work. He keeps his phone close at hand, so he can text her something every hour if she doesn’t first. 

He waits until the four o’clock text to remind her: _I’m coming by your studio in a bit so we can go to dinner tonight. I made reservations._

_Oh no, I think I have paint in my hair. Sorry, forgot I was supposed to stay clean today._

_It’s okay. I like everything, remember?_

_Sorry Ben, I look really messy. I forgot._

_You really think I mind?_

_No. Still….. One of these days I promise I’ll tidy up proper._

Ben approaches her studio with the full expectation that he’ll have to go upstairs. Rey will probably still be at work, and he’ll have to gently remind her again of their 6:30 reservations. But she will look disheveled and breathlessly beautiful - the way she always does when she’s engrossed in a piece - and Ben won’t mind being a little late. 

Instead, Rey is outside already. Ben bites down a smile when he sees her obvious attempts to make herself presentable. A section of her hair is wet - probably where she scrubbed paint out in the sink. Her blouse is turned inside out - probably because paint splatters inevitably strayed off her smock. 

She’s looking the other way as he approaches. In moments like this, Ben still can’t shake the thought that he must have dreamed it all. Her clothes in the closet, her artwork scattered through the house in various stages of completion, and never waking up alone. He dreamed it all, and when she turns, he’ll be a stranger to her once again.

It’s a little ridiculous, how Ben’s throat goes tight with nerves. 

“Rey.”

She turns, her eyes scan the street, and when they fix on Ben her entire face glows. 

“I look silly,” she says in greeting. 

Ben brushes the backs of his fingers across her cheek, and just the fact that he can walk up to her and touch her in familiarity is enough to illuminate him completely.

“You look beautiful.”

He bends to kiss her. She smiles into his mouth, her small hands against his chest. 

“Pretty sure your opinion’s still worthless,” she chimes, grinning just against his lips as her fingers play with his tie.

Ben chuckles and presses one more kiss to the corner of her mouth before taking her hand as they walk towards the restaurant.

It seems she does that more and more - little comments that reference something from hours or even days before. Little, throwaway moments Ben gathers in his heart.

*

Not every night goes so well. Sometimes, Ben has long meetings and can’t send the regular hourly texts. 

She spirals sometimes. If she realizes she forgot something important, she panics and has trouble retrieving anything. 

_I don’t know where home is._

_I think you’re who I’m supposed to text._

_We live together, right?_

_Please come get me._

_I don’t know where I am._

_I don’t know where to go._

Ben pulls his coat on, already half out the door. 

_I’m on my way. Stay there, I’ll be there soon._

Ben makes sure her location tracking is always activated on her phone, and that she never leaves the house without a full battery. 

He follows the little dot on his phone map until he finds her outside the library - several blocks away from her studio and the complete opposite direction from their house. 

She says nothing when she sees him, but a bit of the distress shading her features instinctively unravels. 

Ben resists the urge to pull her straight into his arms. Instead, he just lays a reassuring, grounding hand on her arm. 

“It’s okay. It’s Ben. I’m going to bring you home, okay?”

“I.. I don’t know… I’m sorry, Ben.”

“Don’t be sorry. It’s all okay.”

Then she tucks herself into his side as they walk. Ben twists out of his coat and lays it over her shoulders. She holds it closed around herself, and he doesn’t miss that she sinks her nose into the collar, breathing in his scent. 

She breathes a little more easily, once they’re home. Ben stands in the doorway, watching her go to hang his coat on precisely the right hanger where he always leaves it. She makes a slow circuit through the house, running her fingers along her own pieces of artwork on the walls, opening the fridge to see all the fruits and snacks and ice cream flavors that are her favorites, taking in her own sweaters and socks strewn in corners and across chairs where only she would have left them, standing in the doorway of the bedroom to take in lungfuls of the commingled scent of both of them together. 

That, more than anything, makes everything fall back into place. 

She finds her way back to Ben, who’s still standing near the door, waiting to see what kind of reminders she needs right now. 

She knows there is only one. 

She comes close and kisses him. She pulls him down to her, her arms sure and greedy around his neck, until he is convinced it’s okay to let go.

Ben hauls her close against himself, breathing hard into her mouth as Rey’s tongue presses against his. 

“Don’t think we’ll make it to the bedroom,” Rey pants, already pushing one hand down beneath the waistband of Ben’s pants to reach for him. “Take me on the couch. Please, Ben.”

He is already lifting her off the floor, her thighs up at his hips. 

“We’ll make it,” he manages, voice already strained.

In their bed, Ben peels her clothes off and hungrily kisses the exposed skin. He moves quickly, despite how Rey keeps fisting her hands in his hair to pull his mouth back up to her own. 

“Ben,” she murmurs in a hushed voice like awe. He moves against her slowly, filling her precisely and devastatingly - in the way that makes nothing and everything make sense. There are no words or lucid thoughts to capture all that surges through them when they are joined - no language or concept that renders it comprehensible. 

Still, it is truth. The only truth they need. The truth that makes all things holy. 

Ben makes sure Rey is on her side, held close against his chest. He covers her mating gland with his lips, so she crests through the storm with a lighthouse clear in sight.

“Rey,” he whispers as she breathes hard in his arms. He kisses along her neck, up and down and then across her shoulder. Her fingers seek his, and she turns her head back towards him, eyes resolved and glad. 

She is calm now. She goes to retrieve her own pajamas from the correct drawer, insists on making dinner and ruins it in her usual fashion, finds the toothpaste without needing to ask, and when they return to bed later she immediately hands Ben the extra pillow he usually sleeps with. 

She burrows close in Ben’s arms once the lights are out. 

“Hey, Ben?” she asks, her fingers tracing idle patterns across his chest. 

“Hm?”

She slides her hand down to find one of his, and brings it up to rest at the back of her neck, over her mating gland. Immediately, Ben is wide awake again. 

“It’s almost time.”

Ben stares into the dark for a long moment, sure Rey can hear his heart pounding in his chest. His mind is racing, but his heart seizes in a way that borders painful.

He wets his lips. “You mean… your heat is coming?”

He feels her nod as she snuggles still closer against him. 

“Could feel it, when you were inside. I just felt this overwhelming need. To smell like you. To wear your scent and give you part of me to carry with you always.” She shifts her head on his chest. “To be bonded to you, to be yours in every possible way.” 

Breath coming short, Ben bends his head to bring his lips as close to her gland as he can. He feels her sigh in happiness as he nuzzles against her gland, scenting her. 

“Soon, Rey,” he promises. He wraps her up more tightly to himself, pressing his words to her mating gland. “You’re my Omega. Soon you will be my mate.”

“Did you… always want this?”

His thoughts all muddled and hazy, Ben clarifies, “This?”

“To mate me. It feels so clear that we were made for this - for each other. But after you found out about me… about my condition. Were there times you ever wished it was different?”

Ben blinks, needing a moment to focus through the fog of contentment and pure, utter perfection filling him as he holds Rey in his arms and she goes still more warm and soft as he slathers his scent to her. 

“Rey, I…” He has to pull back to see her eyes, to cup her face in one wide hand. To trace his thumb along the line of her upper lip. He’s sure he dreamed those dips and gentle swells long before he ever laid eyes on her. “Since the day I met you… it’s not enough to say I ‘wanted’ this. It’s also not right to say I had no choice - that this was simply the fate dealt to me. I would _always_ have chosen this. You. Any version of you. I would always choose you.”

Ben lowers his face to her neck again, this time for his own grounding and place.

“I thought my life was just fine, before you. But the day I met you was like… like a new reality opened to me that I’d been blind to. Then I started falling in love with you, just in those stolen moments together. And this reality I found with you - it still seems like something far too good for this world. How could I ever go back, after that?”

No matter that he can’t see it, Rey can’t stop smiling. She threads her fingers through Ben’s hair, petting him and cradling his head and shoulders close to her.

She can’t wait to bear his mark.

“I’m never letting you go back. You’re mine, Ben.” Her scent spikes, with all the pheromones that make her so unspeakably inviting. “You’re mine.”

*

“You know, even when I forget things… It doesn’t all just disappear.”

The bedroom is dark. Sweat is still drying on Ben’s skin. Rey is still naked and damp where she lies mostly atop him, his hands cradling her close. 

Ben nuzzles behind her ear. “What do you mean?”

“I mean… there are things that go deeper than memory.”

Rey traces a fingertip in patterns along Ben’s bare chest. He swears he feels her making countless infinity signs.

“When I wake up and the memories aren’t there right away. Or when I get lost and I don’t immediately understand why I feel so relieved as soon as I see you… It all comes back, sooner or later. I promise it does.”

Ben cradles her closer, mouthing at her neck. 

“I know, sweetheart. Sometimes it takes time, but it comes back to you.”

A soft, gentle sound unfolds from Rey’s chest - something between a purr and a hum of contentment, as Ben kisses slowly along her jaw.

“Like love,” she murmurs, barely there.

“What’s that?” Ben whispers, his lips brushing feather-light across the corner of Rey’s mouth. He envelopes her completely in the curve of his own body, and she trembles just a little bit in the warmth and belonging.

“I always know I love you. I always know you’re mine. Even in those terrible moments when I don’t remember _you._ It just takes one kiss. For you to hold me just once, and every single kiss and embrace floods back. My memory hides every one of them deep inside like buried treasure, then has to be coaxed to let them out.” 

Ben’s throat suddenly feels as if an entire stone is trapped inside.

He covers her mouth with his and kisses her for a long time.

“Did that do anything?” he eventually murmurs against her lips, smiling a weightless smile.

Rey’s fingers trail through his hair, stroking the strands back with profound affection.

“More than you’ll ever know.”

Ben realizes - all the longing and solitude that came before this truly doesn’t matter. Even if he had the power, there isn’t a single detail of their world he would change.

*

He wakes, full with the potent, irrefutable scent of her. She smells… beyond belief, and she is everywhere. Only half awake as dawn trickles through the blinds like sand through a sieve, Ben presses closer and buries his nose in the warmth of her neck. Her scent expands and bursts bright in his chest as he breathes deep. The rumbling noise that rises from within him is all instinct. It is the need to possess, just as much as to worship. 

Without his awareness, his cock is already stiff and standing - ready to claim its home inside her for the next few days.

Rey is hot to the touch and whimpers quietly in her sleep. 

Hands shaking with the effort of will, Ben forces himself to climb silently from the bed. His very skin seems to want to leap from his body to remain with her, where all of him is meant to be. Every single cell making up his body feels as if it’s vibrating - raw and desperate and near helpless to the pull of her that almost obliterates the rest of the world.

Counting each of his slow, labored breaths in effort to stop himself from racing back to the bed and knotting her while she’s still sleeping, Ben goes to the hallway closet and takes down the boxes he’s been accumulating over the past weeks. Inside are silk sheets, lambswool blankets, and a few of his own old, worn garments. He’s been regularly taking out the new items and scenting them, so he’d be ready for this. Ready to provide her everything she needs.

Ben dresses. Rey comes awake as Ben carries the boxes into the bedroom to line them up beside the bed for her.

Rey releases a small moan of discomfort, as one of her hands emerges from beneath the blankets to reach for him. Ben kneels down beside the bed, immediately taking her hand between both of his own and kissing the backs of her fingers. 

“I’m here, Rey. Everything’s okay. I just have to go put a few things in order at the office, and I’ll be back right away. Then I’m staying here with you for the rest of the week.”

Rey blinks slowly, her half-awake state adding to her disorientation. 

“Ben,” she rasps. “Hot.”

Ben kisses her hand again, then leans up to press his lips to her forehead. Her face is flushed, her skin warming. He might think she’s just feverish - but for the way Ben can feel his rut edging closer with each passing moment. He can barely see her where she’s wrapped in blankets, but he can sense exactly what’s happening in her body. 

With her Alpha finally, _finally_ here close at hand, her temperature inches up degree by degree in anticipation. Between her legs, her inner muscles are already quivering in ripe readiness. Knowing exactly what awaits, every inch of her body thrums in invitation and offering. 

Ben is already thinking about fucking her so hard she’ll never think straight again; spending hours just sucking her perfect tits; devouring her cunt and drinking her slick until _he’s_ full of _her._

He has to catch his breath and force out, “I’ll bring you a cold compress. Just one second, sweetheart.”

Ben hurries to the bathroom and makes a washcloth as cold as he can. When he returns, he lays it over Rey’s forehead and kisses her once more for good measure. 

“I’ll be right back, Rey, I swear. Alpha will take care of you.”

Rey nods weakly. “I’ll be good… for Alpha.”

Kneeling beside the bed, Ben’s heart lurches in his chest. It never stopped reacting to the word, but right now he’s particularly susceptible to it. 

“I left you blankets and some of my old shirts here, okay Rey? In case you want to nest.”

Rey nods again, her eyes half closed. “Good. My Alpha.”

She extends shaking fingers and draws the tips once along Ben’s cheek. 

“My Alpha. It’s all for you.”

Ben is so weak, so devastated already. In his mind, Ben is screaming at himself. _Get the hell out so you can get the hell back and get inside her. Knot her and claim her the way she was meant to be._

He swallows as he turns his head towards her touch. 

“My Omega. I will take it all. Every inch of you.”

She seems to fall back to dozing, then. Ben kicks himself to stand up, to take one step and then the next towards the door. Her voice, seeking and unsure, stops him just at the door.

“Ben...? Will you finally make me your mate? I… I’ve been so alone, without your mark.”

Ben swallows past the knife-sharp remnants of heartache - still stumbling blocks to his own thoughts and memories.

His fingers curl harshly around the doorframe.

“Yes, Rey. You told me you wanted to wait for your heat to do it. I’m going to claim you. I’m going to mark your mating gland so you can never, ever forget that you’re mine. That we belong to each other. With each other.”

“Oh. Ben.”

Ben stands in the doorway, immobile, until her breathing seems to even out again. He scrawls her a quick note reminding her he’ll soon be back, in case she awakens and forgets, which he lays on the bedside table. Then he rushes for the front door, heart pounding.

Ben fights not to rut against the damn steering wheel as he drives. In the parking lot of his office, he has to quickly take himself in hand and rub off the edge, just so he can go inside without looking obscene. 

With instructions given to his secretary and colleagues as to handling his cases in his absence, he hurries back to the car half an hour later. He makes a quick stop at the grocery store, paying no attention to the precise numbers or prices as he dumps all of Rey’s favorite ice creams, chocolates, fruits, and sweet drinks in his cart. He grabs a stack of ten frozen lasagnas, and sweeps up a container of the chocolate croissants she always sneaks into their cart. 

Back home in just over an hour, Ben rushes in and throws all the groceries in their approximate places in the fridge and freezer. 

His hand on the door of the fridge he just stocked with everything that might bring Rey some comfort - Ben slows for a moment as reality settles in. 

Rey is here, on the verge of her heat. She wants him to finally mate her. She is going into heat in what is now their bedroom, and he will share it as he was always meant to. He has gone his whole life without the chance to do what he was made for - to satisfy and care for her. 

Ben knows his purpose. After being sure for so long that it would go unfulfilled, he nearly can’t breathe through the proximity of all he has ever wanted.

Ben’s euphoria fades as he approaches the bedroom and a soft, hiccuping sound reaches his ears. The sound he would know anywhere - that he loathes above all else. 

He falls through the doorway. “I’m here, Rey. I’m here.”

Rey sits up abruptly, her tear-filled eyes wide and startled. Her lips tremble as she gasps shaking breaths. 

The boxes beside the bed are all empty. Rey has piled every last blanket and old shirt atop herself. She’d been clutching an armful of his old shirts to her chest, the fabric bathed in his scent lifted high as if she’d been pressing her face there. The shirts fall from her arms as she extends them towards Ben.

“I-I didn’t know where you went. I thought you’d gone. Thought you’d _left me…_ ”

Her voice stutters and cracks high.

Ben’s throat seems to constrict for senseless guilt. It doesn’t matter that he told her, that he was gone for barely over an hour and even left a note. In her current state, it’s clear she is in dire need - incapacitated in almost every way. She can’t make sense of what her own body is experiencing, let alone the jumble of memories that cause her trouble on even her best days.

Ben moves more quickly than he ever has in his life. He nearly lifts her from her nest entirely as he sweeps her into his arms and his lap, cradling her as close as he can. Her tears continue to flow as she clings to him, curling up to him so tightly, she might be trying to climb inside him. 

“Started thinking I imagined everything. That we were ever even together…”

“I’m not leaving your side, Rey. Not for a second.” Ben’s voice almost nears a growl. Now that he feels her heat rising in full - now that he knows there is no longer a single thing in the way of _her_ and his oncoming rut, he can’t keep the primal possession from rising in his words. He can’t hide how very, very much he means it. Wouldn’t want to hide it even if he could. 

She is his. Soon she won’t ever forget it. 

“Ben. Ben. _Ben_ ,” Rey whines in an endless loop. She looks far too warm in her pajamas. Her face is so hot, so flushed where she has it pressed against his neck, gulping down his scent. She wines his name with raw urgency. 

Ben lets go of her for a moment to reach for the bottom of his shirt. But Rey moves even faster - scrabbling to get his clothes out of the way as she pants in his lap. 

Her heady scent fills the room, permeating all of Ben’s senses and driving him nearly mad with his own growing need. 

“ _Alpha_ ,” Rey whimpers. In a movement utterly graceless with desperation, yet the most beautiful he’s ever seen, Rey slips between his knees to kneel before him. Before Ben can mutter so much as a protest or a _'good girl'_ (he has no idea what would have come out of his mouth), Rey has already unzipped where he’s torturously hard.

She makes a noise of pure-hearted fulfillment, of utter joy as her mouth sinks over him. The torment in her expression finally relaxes as her jaw eases open to swallow around inch after inch of him. Ben’s vision nearly blanks out. He retains just enough sense not to buck his hips up, but his hands are stunned and adoring in her hair. Rey pulls off occasionally just to nuzzle the considerable, throbbing size of him, mouthing and kissing where his knot will later expand to keep them locked together for hours at a time.

It’s Ben’s turn to pant as Rey murmurs, “My mouth was made for you.”

It’s true. Even long before Rey ever did this for him - before Ben even entertained the thought - just the sight of her lips on that day in the flower shop was enough to ruin Ben permanently.

Ben grunts as Rey closes her eyes and sinks down again until he’s buried all the way in her throat. His fingers flex and tremble in her hair, but Ben just manages to stop himself from pulling. He can _feel_ himself throbbing between the tight suction of her lips and tongue - can feel how her throat gets tighter and tighter as his cock grows thicker with the rut edging closer by the second.

Speech spills from Ben’s mouth without him even realizing it: “Everything about you was made for me. To torment me. To please me. To make me fall in love with you all over again every fucking day. When I couldn’t have you, I…”

His hips stutter upwards once, and Ben quickly cuts off both his words and his movement. 

Seemingly unbothered, Rey slides her lips up and off him, licking up the spit and pre-cum that leaks from her mouth. She hums as she presses her lips to the wet head of his cock. She lifts a hand and strokes her fingers up and down the shaft almost lovingly. She kisses down the length as her fingers pump him slowly at the base. The only clear thought she has is a vague yet unshakeable recollection of how good Ben makes her feel with this beautiful cock. 

Kissing and suckling at just the head, Rey reaches up to tangle her fingers with Ben’s in her hair. Holding his fingers, she presses them tighter to her head with purpose. She pulls off him just long enough to look up at him through dark, hooded eyes. She breathes hard - thanks in part to her overheated temperature, the rest due to the stream of slick already soaking through her pajamas bottoms. 

She begs, hoarse: “Use me, Alpha. Please.”

She presses his hands against her head again as she opens her lips wide and slides down most of the way. 

“ _Rey_ ,” Ben grinds out, trembling beneath her. Rey lowers her hands to prop herself against his thighs. She bobs down and back up his length, her throat opening a little more each time, but it’s not as _forceful_ as she craves. Ben only pushes a little at first - only the moments when Rey’s lips briefly touch down to the base. It’s just - Rey knows she can do better. She _knows_ she can hold him in for longer, that she can bring him more pleasure if he fills her throat completely. 

Ben is so deliciously thick and sinfully hot between her lips - the scent and taste of him is everything Rey wants in the world. Her blazing body craves more _more_ of him - everything she can swallow down. 

Ben watches her with bleary eyes as she works so hard. She is good, so good - his Omega. She’s trying so hard to take him deeper, like _she_ needs it just as much as he does. That is the thought that finally snaps Ben’s control. 

His fingers tighten suddenly in her hair and he groans from a deep, primal space in his chest as he starts guiding her mouth up and down his cock. The immediate noise of gratification she makes sets him loose completely. He starts pulling her down harder, until he starts to feel a place so deep and tight in her throat, stars crowd into his vision. She gags briefly, but her fingers are rapturously tight against his thigh and her scent keeps screaming for more. 

“Your throat, your mouth, your lips - all made for me,” Ben growls as he brings her down just a bit harder. Saliva is running down her chin now, but she’s making noises of need and pleasure between each time she gags. “They’re all _mine_ , Rey. Every inch of you belongs to me.”

Her fingers scrabble against his thighs. She tries to nod in eager agreement, but Ben’s hands are firm and keep her moving up and down - keeping her whole mouth and throat full. 

“Hear me, Omega? You’re mine. Your body is mine. Your heart is mine. Your heat and your slick are mine. It’s all for me. Only me. And as long as your heat goes on, I’m going to fuck you nonstop. Like I was made for.”

The choked sound she makes isn’t a gasp for breath, but a gasp of what his words do to her. She brings herself down hard the next time, feeling him shove clean past her gag reflex. She holds herself there, ignoring the tears forming in her eyes, and makes herself swallow around all that stunning, magnificent thickness until - 

Ben’s exclamation is muted between his teeth when he comes. Rey swallows once before she’s forced to pull off for air. She makes a noise of surprise then deep, rich pleasure when a spurt of his release paints across her mouth. She licks him eagerly, trying to taste and swallow every last drop she can catch. Ben is petting her hair now, panting with predatory eyes as he softly croons, “My good girl. My good, beautiful Omega. All mine.”

“Yours,” she breathes in blissful agreement. Once she has licked up every drop of him she can find, she starts suckling at the head again, her eyes closed. He’s nearing rut which means he won’t go soft, and Rey wants him filling her mouth so long as she lives…

Ben has other ideas. He reaches down and lifts her in one fluid motion up onto her back on the bed. She looks startled by the sudden movement - her perception sluggish with the heat addling her brain. 

Ben wipes her lips with his fingertips, clearing away the lingering smudges of himself.

“Finally,” Ben breathes in wonder. “I get to see my Omega blooming in heat.”

He undresses her without preamble, her noises of encouragement loud and insistent. 

Once she’s naked, Ben spreads her out in the nest of his blankets and old shirts. 

“Ben. _Ben_ ,” Rey chants in a mindless, nonsensical litany. 

Ben lifts her thighs wide apart, and chokes on his next breath.

She is - obscene beyond description. He has never seen her so flushed, so _swollen._ Her clit is dark red and plump, practically begging for his mouth. Further down, her entrance is already gaping in welcome for him and he can _see_ a trickle of slick sliding from within her. 

Ben might come from just the sight of her. 

“You look…. _Fuck_ , Rey. You’re beyond anything I could imagine.” He presses his lips to the inside of her thigh, just to feel how she goes boneless and relaxed - to hear her soft mewling sound from above him. He breathes his words into the soft skin of her inner thigh, “You’re so very, very good, Omega. Getting so wet like this. Getting ready for my knot.”

“ _Ben_ …” She writhes happily, his praise making her yet more desperate for his touch.

He brings his mouth closer to her, moving slowly as he revels in the heat coming off her.

“You know, Rey, this is mine too.”

He skims his hand up her other thigh, bringing his fingers and lips ever closer to her. 

“Your cunt is mine to eat as I please.”

Rey lets out a grateful, hyper-stimulated shout as Ben’s mouth finally presses to her. Feeling her tension and the pressure of her building heat, Ben does not tease her. Rather, he goes immediately and relentlessly straight for her clit, circling his tongue around it before he sucks the searing-hot bud into his mouth to suck hard.

Rey convulses against him. She cries out in a voice that cracks, her feet bumping against Ben’s back as her entire body lurches with the onslaught of sensation. Ben hooks her thighs securely over his shoulders and presses his face tighter against her. He sucks her straight through two raucous, thrashing orgasms - one fast on the heels of the other. By the third, Ben has two fingers buried all the way inside her and she sobs through the force of it. 

Mindlessly addicted to the taste of her, growing more and more unbelievable each time she comes, Ben keeps stroking his tongue against her. Inside her, his fingertips massage the spot that always makes her unravel. Rey is incoherent, crying out and shaking against him violently as she comes a fourth time - slower and much, much longer this time.

The mounting scent of her overwhelming pleasure and her pulsating heat fills every inch of the room. She drenches Ben’s hand with her slick as she comes against his mouth again, and when she whimpers _Alpha_ in a voice completely mindless in her need, trust, and adoration for him - his rut roars awake like a switch being thrown. 

Later, Ben will realize his mind completely whited out for what might have been minutes but could have been hours. He has no memory of shedding his underwear or moving into position, but his conscious awareness filters back to the sound of Rey’s soft gasps as the pace and force of his thrusts bodily rocks her beneath him. He has her spread open in the nest she made, near drenched in her own slick and sweat as Ben holds her thighs as wide apart as they’ll go and keeps surging as deep inside her as he possibly can. He has no idea how many times he’s made her come already, while he keeps going.

“Don’t stop,” she mewls as she quakes beneath him with the threat of yet another orgasm, her eyes squeezed shut and mouth trembling. “I-It hurts, can’t come again but it-it’s too _hot_. Ben, I… I’m going to fall apart but _don’t stop…_ ”

“I’ll make sure you come again,” Ben growls, his hold on her tightening as he finds some reserve of strength to push deeper inside her. She arches beneath him, her skin flushed the most beautiful pink and the sounds that spill from her mouth something out of a dream. He thrusts in hard and feels her body lock up tight around him, chaos and surrender erupting at once within her in response to his invasion surging so impossibly deep. 

She doesn’t scream his name, but gasps it in a whisper so fractured and delicate, he wouldn’t have understood if he hadn’t been so far inside her that all her thoughts become bared to him. Ben gasps in shock as she comes in a slow, compulsive tidal wave that draws him out to sea with her. His knot starts to swell, and for a split second Ben has a flash of rational concern that he shouldn’t knot her this deep. Except her arms and legs all close around him, the unspeakable inner parts of her clutch him tight within her, and her voice is soft and airy like a clean, pure breeze against his face. 

“Inside, I was made for you. Only you.”

At any other time, Ben would marvel at how he can feel her thoughts within his own head - as plain and comprehensible as if they’re his own. But in this moment, every single thing in the entire world is unspeakably beautiful and Ben understands each microscopic detail perfectly. 

Rey doesn’t just mean physically. Part of her did refer to the fact that no one else could ever fuck her this deep - no one else could fit so precisely to the shape of all her inner peaks and landscapes. No one else could sense the pulsing spikes of her heat the way Ben does. She means all of that - but what she also means are all the parts of herself that can’t be touched or felt. The parts that can only be learned through time, hardship, devotion, and a clairvoyance for the unique language spoken by her body alone.

She means that she is meant for him in every way - because he is meant for her in all the same ways.

Ben’s knot begins to empty - filling all the bright, dazzling spaces within her that are only for him. 

As his release floods into the places within her it will never be meant to leave, he watches Rey open her eyes. He watches her look up at him, her gaze clear and precise. She reaches up one trembling hand to his face, her fingertips touching his cheek, the corner of his mouth, the small creases where his smiles usually land.

More clearly than if Rey had spoken aloud and entirely irrefutable, Ben feels what flows into him from where they’re locked together - no longer an invasion but a joyous, rapturous exchange of truth. A sense of perception based upon steadfast certainty of the same love shared between them. Love that does not depend on the memory of a single time or place, but lives sempiternal. 

_I’m ready._

Her mating gland calls to his mouth. Ben moves without thought or effort. His name whispered from her lips is the last thing he hears before his teeth find their way into her skin. 

His knot throbs inside her, as the world seems to slip away. Nothing outside this room - outside each other - means much of anything anymore. She is all. 

He will never hurt nor fear again, for she is here now. She always will be.

A promise, no less powerful for its hushed tone: “Rey.”

In Rey’s own mind, Ben makes sure she knows the same. He swears she will always know.

A promise made in return, with equal reverence: “Ben.”

They don’t let go of each other for hours - the pristine, renewing snowfall of their mating turning the whole world to wonder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now the babies are truly together for good! :'D There's still plenty more to happen during Rey's heat, so the next part will pick up right where this one left off. There will be at least another 2 chapters, but that could change as I keep editing from this point on. I can't believe posting this whole thing is going by so quickly! 
> 
> I look forward to all your thoughts! :) Or drop me a line on [Tumblr](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/xoruffitup)!


	8. That Moment When You Feel Alright

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops, how did I write an entire chapter's worth of basically nothing but heat smut? *sweats* I don't know what came over me here... I think after writing all the angst up to this point, I just really needed to write these two feeling good and happy together? Uh... repeatedly and passionately? 
> 
> I AM INNOCENT HERE, I SWEAR.

  
[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/49932358248/in/dateposted/)  


As her heat seems to make recollections still more elusive, Ben gets into the habit of waking her with the same reminders.

“It’s okay, Rey. You’re going through heat. You’re with me, Ben. I’m your mate. I’m taking care of you.”

He never lets her out of his sight, not wanting her to think for even a moment that he’s left her alone. They spend most of the time knotted together, but when they’re not, it’s impossible for Ben to keep his hands off her. Every second he’s not inside her or making her come seems unbearable. She’s already the most alluring thing he’s ever seen. In heat, she is pure compulsion. 

He can’t get enough of her slick. How it just _keeps_ coursing from her. How she is always sopping wet and so, so ready to be fucked for hours on end. 

He loves spreading her open, pressing his mouth to her and sucking hot mouthfuls straight from inside her. She claws his hair as he presses his tongue as deep inside her as he can reach and greedily swallows everything pouring from her. 

“You’ll drive me insane with how you taste,” Ben rasps before shifting to take her clit between his lips. “I could live on this forever.”

He stays right there between her thighs, working her with his lips and tongue until her countless orgasms start lasting so long, time spools away and Rey forgets coherent thought. He keeps sucking her clit until his mouth might mold permanently to the shape of her - until she is undone, sobbing with the kind of pleasure that confounds every nerve ending in her entire body. She makes noises ardent and desperate, like the feel of Ben’s mouth devouring her cunt is all she has ever and will ever know. It must be hours later when Ben finally exhausts himself and lifts his head. His mouth is swollen - his lips a bright, gleaming red from pleasuring her for so long.

He crawls up to take her in his arms, lifts one of her thighs over his hip and sinks his cock into her for good measure. Rey licks her own slick from his lips, then slips into a relaxed state with neither strength nor conscious thought as the slow slide of Ben inside her keeps all discomfort away.

She naps. Ben keeps holding her. When she wakes, he whispers his usual reminders:

“Everything’s okay. You’re going through heat. You’re with me, Ben. I’m your mate. I’m taking care of you.”

The next time, she wakes flushed and crying. There is no time for words as she pleads, “ _Alpha, help_.”

Ben’s mind clicks off again. He holds her thighs apart and fucks her for hours straight. He batters the places buried within her that make her come again and again only minutes apart. When she’s out of breath and pleading, he pushes her thighs nearly back against her shoulders and keeps pounding into her. A loud, sharp noise erupts from her as if it’s too much, but her body is practically pouring slick. Ben can feel it gushing out around him every time his cock drives in. 

Ben kisses tears from her face later, when she’s barely able to process the mounting pressure inside her from Ben’s knotted cock, the heat of his cum, and all her endless slick all trapped inside. Still, she murmurs in a whisper of elation, “Full of Alpha. I’m so full of Alpha. So full of Alpha…”

Ben emits a guttural sound of gratification when he finally pulls out, and a rush of his own seed mixed with her slick follows. His eyes are dark and possessive as he gazes at her.

“I want you covered in Alpha.”

He trails his fingers through her folds until his fingertips drip with her slick - with _them._

A deep, contented rumble rises from him as he reaches up to coat her nipples with the slick still dripping from her even now. Rey makes a broken, shocked sound when Ben bends his head close and begins the slow, thorough task of licking away each smear of commingled slick and cum across her tits. He takes his time even once she’s dry, swirling his tongue around her nipple and then sucking until Rey’s breathing threatens to stutter out.

Ben looks up into her eyes as he dips a hand between her legs again to gather more evidence of their union. He watches her face as he raises his hand towards her mouth, then stops. 

“Is this okay?”

Rey feels her heartbeat ratchet up at the deep strain to his voice. She’s never heard anything quite so magnificent.

She whispers, “More than okay,” then allows her lips to drift open. 

Ben paints her mouth with the slick and cum that just minutes ago had been trapped within her own body by his knot. 

Rey’s lips tremble, until Ben comes close and kisses her wet mouth. She whimpers softly, so he wraps her close in his arms as his tongue gathers every last drop along her lips and then shares it between them in deep, sliding kisses. 

Rey relaxes completely in his arms. She makes soft, content noises around Ben’s tongue as it strokes along and between her lips. 

Her motions automatic - oblivious to the fact that Ben only just finished fucking her for hours straight - she takes one of his hands in hers and moves it between her legs. She sighs in pure happiness as he slides two fingers deep inside her, stroking everywhere he touches.

“More than okay,” she murmurs again, tucking her head beneath his chin and cuddling as close as she can.

*

Later, he carries her to the bathroom and sits her on the counter as he draws a bath. She whines and reaches for him, until he lets her suck him off as the bathtub fills. Ben won’t come from this alone in his state of rut, but that hardly stops him from stroking Rey’s hair, touching her lips where they’re stretched wide around him, and murmuring, “Good girl. My Omega is so very good.” She bobs her head and makes grateful noises around him.

In the bath, Ben takes care to thoroughly wash and rinse her hair. He cleans her with a soft washcloth, despite the fact that she’ll be coated in sweat, slick, and cum all over again soon enough.

He knots her again and holds her against his chest in the soapy water. He lines up a row of kisses across her wet forehead. Rey makes formless noises of content, nuzzling against Ben’s neck as she lays against him, relaxed to her last muscle. 

When the water begins going cold, Ben takes her out from the tub and dries her. He wraps a towel quickly around his own waist, before taking out a new towel to wrap her in. She watches in the mirror with hazy eyes and a tranquil smile as Ben gently brushes her wet hair and starts the hair dryer. Once her hair is dry, Rey turns to nuzzle against his neck again. 

“Alpha takes care of me.”

Deep in Ben’s chest, something unfurls. 

Before she chose to stay, Ben craved her touch - the taste of her lips and the embrace of her body. He longed for her every day he couldn’t have her. Yet it was something deeper than the inadequacy of his body without hers that truly wore upon him - in the way that made it difficult to see the reason in anything, without her. 

His hands were made to clean and soothe and satisfy her. His height and his wide shoulders were made to carry and shelter her. His mouth and his voice were made to reach her, when her heat rages or her memory leaves her stranded. Every cell in his body, every Alpha instinct and desire that shapes him - it is all to serve the sole purpose of caring for her, any and every way she needs.

Without her, he was nothing. Wasted. Useless. With her, he serves her as he was meant to, and in doing so he becomes all. He grows stronger, capable, significant. He grows to the vast reaches of all she deserves.

He lifts a hand to cover the new mark upon her mating gland. The mark that means more than he will ever be able to put to words. Rey makes a sound like a purr when his touch rests there. 

“Alpha always will,” he rumbles into her warm, dry hair. The most solemn promise he has ever spoken, and also the most effortless. “Always.”

Possessed by the need to touch her constantly and as much as possible, Ben carries her to the bedroom to dress her in warm, clean pajamas. He throws on his own sweatpants, then takes her hand and brings her out to the kitchen, where he sits her on the counter and feeds her fruit and ice cream. 

They’re halfway through the pint of ice cream when Rey lifts a hand to touch his face. Ben hesitates, the full spoon in his hand hovering just outside her mouth. But she simply gives him a soft, pleased smile and murmurs, “It’s my favorite flavor.”

Ben smiles back as she closes her lips around the offered spoonful. He can’t help kissing her, even with her mouthful of ice cream. 

“I know, my love.”

Back in the bedroom, Ben holds her hips perhaps a bit tighter as his rut pulls him all the way to that secret, clenching place inside her that makes her face go slack and her sounds fervent. 

Each time he pushes deep within her, he keeps whispering ‘my love’ over and over again. He can’t seem to stop. Not when he can speak something like that and finally mean it. It’s always been true for himself, but now the world has changed enough that she might come to know it too. 

*

Ben tries to cook, but Rey insists she will only eat lasagna. So, he has her wrapped in a blanket and sitting atop the kitchen counter as he stands between her knees and feeds her forkfuls from one of the store-bought trays. He makes sure she drinks plenty of water. He alternates a few bites for himself, but this time she doesn’t scrunch up her face in feigned affront. 

She seems thoughtful this afternoon. Ben doesn’t have full command yet over how to sense and trade through their newly-forged bond. So he feeds her silently, leaving his mate to her inner workings.

Once the tray is empty, one of Rey’s hands emerges from beneath the blanket to curl around Ben’s wrist. He sets the empty tray down, but remains where he stands. She looks away rather than at him - her expression more downcast than Ben can understand a reason for. He’s just about to wrap her in his arms and ask what the matter is, when she opens her mouth.

“I don’t think you know about the accident.”

Ben tries to hide his surprise. He sets his jaw and draws closer to her, his arms moving to loosely frame her waist. Somehow, it’s even _more_ difficult now, just to think of it. The side of him desperate to know wars with the side that doesn’t want her to suffer speaking of it. 

“Only that there was one. A car accident. You… hit the windshield.”

Rey nods, her expression desolate but focused. 

“I was sixteen. To you, it probably seems like the day my life was ruined. But actually… it was the day I stopped letting it be ruined.”

Rey moves a hand idly to the waistband of the sweats Ben wears - the only thing he wears. She traces the bare skin of his hip above the waistband, just for something to keep her grounded here, where she is safe. To remind herself that he is her mate now and she wants him to know. After that, she’ll never have to think on it again. It has no bearing anymore on this present life with Ben.

“My dad left when I was too young to remember. Mom never forgave him, and he knew it. But when I got older, he started coming around trying to see me. Mom only ever told me about all the worst parts of him - said we were better off. But I was young, and after never having a dad, I wanted one so badly. I wanted to believe it had all been some big misunderstanding. That he was different. 

“He took me to the beach once. Sometimes to a movie, sometimes for ice cream. I… I remember them as the loveliest of days because I wanted so _badly_ for them to be lovely. I still remember them that way. I didn’t need to have my head bashed in to start fucking up my memory all on my own.

“Mom tried to tell me it wasn’t right. It wasn’t right that he tried to see me when I was alone, when she would never know. She would get so mad, when she realized I smelled like alcohol because _he_ smelled that way when he came around to see me.

“I kept letting him. I wanted to have a dad and I didn’t care what kind of dad he was.”

Her hands retreat back into her own lap. Ben watches as she knots the blanket between her fingers. He leans closer, hoping his body heat will bring her some measure of comfort. He waits for her to go on, though a horrific inkling already grows within him.

“The night when I was sixteen, he was driving me back from the bowling alley. He’d had a few. He swerved into oncoming traffic and the seatbelt wasn’t enough to keep my head out of the windshield. In the minutes when I was unconscious, before I was pulled from the wreck, the seatbelt got twisted and stopped my breathing.”

Ben takes slow, controlled breaths. A firestorm rages within him. He wants to whirl around and break every single fucking thing in his kitchen. But he’s not sure he would stop there, and he tells himself in an ongoing, forceful mantra that a reaction like that would be absolutely no good to Rey. 

He needs to meet her at the same place where she finds herself now, in her processing. He will not drag her back down the way of raging anger that claws at him now, at his first hearing. 

Ben fights to keep his voice relatively steady. “What happened to him?”

Rey shrugs. “He needed a lot of stitches. He was discharged from the hospital and I never saw him again.”

Moving very slowly, very carefully to make sure his movements are fully controlled and as gentle as he can force himself to be with this hatred spitting within him, Ben brings her against the shape of his chest and cradles her there. He kisses just above her ear, and whispers hoarsely, “What can I do?”

Rey presses her face tight against Ben’s shoulder. Her fingers are warm and seeking as they curl around his sides. 

“Don’t think I was stupid. Don’t think I’m weak. I know I should, but… it’s not easy for me to be angry at the girl who made those mistakes.”

Ben’s arms tighten around her. “You did _nothing_ wrong. Hear me, Rey? You are not at fault. You are strong and magnificent.”

Rey’s hands slide to Ben’s back, her arms pulling him still closer. “As a girl, I didn’t want to remember things. I wanted to forget. Then the accident happened and it was almost like all those wishes came true. I was already trying to deny the truth of things, and then the injury put a wall around everything.

“What I hate most of all… is all the _good_ I’ve lost. Everything that’s been stolen away. Every day I’ve ever been happy since then.” She’s crying fully now, hot tears splashing against Ben’s collarbone. “Meeting you was the most important, beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me. And I _can’t remember it._ I don’t know where or when we first met, Ben. And I _hate it_.”

Ben pulls back just enough to take her face between his hands - to lift her head so he can look straight into her eyes, tears or no. 

“We met in a flower shop. The one on Belway, that’s your favorite? I walked in while you were finishing up and when I saw you, I… I froze in the doorway. You were buying daisies and violets. You were wearing a long red skirt and your hair was half braided. You turned, and I accidentally blocked your way out. We introduced ourselves. You said you liked my tie.” Rey gives a small, blessed small at that, accompanied by a tiny hiccup. “You gave me a single daisy - slid it into the pocket of my suit jacket. You asked me to promise to keep it.”

Ben leans in to brush a kiss to her cheek, and before he nods his head towards the flower in the windowsill, Rey asks, “It’s that one, isn’t it?”

Ben looks up, and finds Rey’s eyes fixed on the vase holding the single dried daisy. His mouth parts in wonder. 

“Yes. It’s that one.”

She looks back at him, her expression warm and soothed.

“You kept your promise.”

“I did.”

Ben strokes his thumbs along her cheeks, still cradling her face between his hands.

“I’ll make sure you don’t lose it. I’ll tell you the story every single day, and I’ll be glad for it. It just means that every day I’ll get to relive it with you anew.” He touches a fingertip to her lips, where her smile slowly but surely grows. “Every day, I’ll get to see you smile like this when I tell you.”

“Ben…”

She pushes forward to kiss his lips, then wraps her arms around his neck.

“Take me back to bed. Make me think only of you.”

Ben lifts her from the kitchen counter up into his arms. She starts pressing kisses to the sensitive gland near his ear as he carries her. An exultant warmth courses through her when she remembers the claiming mark she now wears from him.

She thinks - hopes - it will never let her forget it. She is sure she will always be aware of its tender, comforting presence - warm as if the caress of Ben’s lips never leaves her. 

Ben kisses her as he slides inside her again, keeps kissing her as they fall into the natural, sustained rhythm of heat meeting rut. She gasps in the all-consuming throes as Ben works her farther and farther past the edge, again and again. Her body keeps urging him on, keeps clenching more tightly around him, until he fits them together front to back, Ben’s hips rocking to hit her at just the right angle. He licks across her gland where his bite is still healing, and Rey’s entire body locks as the pleasure spikes white hot. 

Ben’s knot begins to pulse in response to Rey reaching her saturation point. He keeps her close - trembling in his arms and whimpering happiness as Ben’s body joins with hers and his lips caress the mating mark he gave her.

It is all she needs to know. The here. The now. The irrelevance of sorrow and the resolution of hope.

*

Rey wakes with Ben still inside her. She drifts for a long moment. Nothing comes to her of the last few days. 

“Alpha?” she seeks, a deep instinct for the only thing that matters.

Behind her, Ben rouses from sleep.

“Yes, Rey. It’s me. I’m here.”

His voice is deep, laced with the vestiges of slumber, but he draws her back a little closer against his chest.

Right now, Rey doesn’t remember. It doesn’t matter. 

She knows it is safe. She knows it is right. 

*

The next morning, Ben only makes it halfway through his usual reminders:

“It’s okay, Rey. You’re going through heat-”

Rey raises a finger to his lips, quieting him. She looks up at him with eyes perfectly clear and whole-heartedly in love. 

She finishes for him: “I’m with you. Ben - my mate. You’re taking care of me. So everything is just fine.”

Ben just stares at her for a long moment, expression incredulous and awed. “You knew what I was going to say?”

Rey traces the shape of his nose, his lips as she nods. “Not every detail, but... you’ve been saying it to me every time I wake up.”

Her fingers migrate to his cheek, and Ben tips his head closer. 

“You’ve been here, every second. You fed me my favorite ice cream and bathed me and brushed my hair. In the kitchen, I… I told you everything. And it ruined nothing. You still love me. I think you always will. I’ve been burning and you’ve been inside me so much, but still there’s this terrible emptiness…”

Rey shifts, her hands on his shoulders as her thighs slide open on either side of him. She presses him back and stretches herself above him, until she can feel him dragging against her, solid and thick. 

Ben lets out a low hiss beneath her, his hands immediately framing her hips. He’s been hard for three days straight now, his rut never flagging and his knot always a mere moment away from producing all the cum she needs to soothe the fires within her. 

Propped up on her knees, Rey rubs her cheek against the scent gland along Ben’s neck as she rocks against him, the swollen head of his cock catching at her entrance, then smearing fluids everywhere between them. 

“Alpha is so strong,” she murmurs, breathy and mindless against Ben’s ear as she reaches down to part herself, rubbing her clit along the searing length of him. “Alpha’s cock is perfect. So big and beautiful. Touches me _everywhere_ when he’s inside, even places I don’t think I’m meant to be touched…”

She takes him in hand, pumps him once and giggles _too big_ against his neck when her fingers can’t meet around him. 

“But not for me,” she whispers as she positions him and sinks just the head inside herself.

Ben groans, low and pained, as she clenches and flutters around just the wide head of his cock. Then, Rey breathes out in soul-deep, speech-defying satisfaction as she begins sinking down onto him all the way.

“Watch me, Alpha,” Rey murmurs at his ear, nibbling the lobe just a little in a way that makes Ben curse and his fingers clench at her hips. “Watch me take all of you like the good girl I am.”

Ben looks down, watching his dark red erection, flushed with all that extra girth and virility from his rut, being swallowed up inch by inch into her body. He swears, voice cracking around the effort it takes not to flip them over and fuck the very breath from her teasing words.

Her breath catches against his ear, once she’s taken him about two-thirds of the way. “There’s so much of you,” she breathes, just stirring her hips in slow circles before sliding down any further. “You’ve been fucking me non-stop but still, I have to work to take all of you.” 

Her speech cuts off, interrupted by a sudden whine as he hits somewhere inside her that makes her flush, all her muscles going stiff. Experimentally, she stirs her hips again and gasps when she finds the spot a second time. 

She feels so good, Ben can only barely keep hold of himself. He slides his hands up her sides then back down, kneading her ass before he grips her hips again. He bites his tongue and forces himself to wait for her to set the pace. 

She keeps whispering to him, “At this point, I start to think it’s impossible. There’s no way I can take it all. It’s too much - I’m too full and my head will shut down, there’s _too much_ to feel…”

She stirs her hips one more time, then clenches all around him, relishing the way it pulls a strangled gasp from Ben’s chest. 

She grins into his neck, nuzzling against his scent gland one more time. 

He smells like her, now. As he should. 

“And then I remember. I was made for this.”

Rey sits up above him. She splays her hands across his abs and makes sure he meets her eyes. And then she sighs, like all the air’s being displaced from her, as she sinks down on him all the way. 

“Mmm,” she hums, the sound drawing out into a moan as she sits still, every inch of her flushed and trembling as she lets Ben take in every detail of how he fills her body to absolute capacity. How the muscles of her thighs strain, how her throat bobs in attempt to remember how to breathe, how her nipples go pink and hard as every nerve ending in her body knows only pleasure.

“I was made to take every last inch of my Alpha.”

Beneath her, Ben swears he may pass out. He’s been inside her for the majority of the last three days, but this is different - intense to the point of pain, with her weight bearing down on him. As he watches the way her hips tremble around the stretch of his knot, he is consumed anew in awe and reverence for her. 

“Omega,” he just barely manages, voice strained and gravelly. This evidence of her effect on him seems to bring her still more happiness. Rey tosses her hair and shifts herself on him just slightly - just to feel him hit against her front walls, so he can watch the shudder of pleasure-pain it sends rippling through her.

A low growl erupts from Ben. “My Omega is so full of me she can barely breathe.”

He lifts a hand to one of her breasts, tweaking a nipple between his fingers until she gasps. She shifts herself again, just to feel him grinding against her inner walls. She pulls his hand to her lips, closing her eyes as she sucks two of his fingers into her mouth while she keeps circling her hips. 

Ben struggles for breath now. “You look radiant, stuffed so full of me.”

Rey hums, nodding immediately as she lowers his wet fingertips to her tits again. Ben rolls her nipple, giving it a slight pinch just to watch her gasp. 

She’s still only barely moving on him, until Ben releases a growl that is all primal command. “Move, Omega. I want to watch your face when you come. I want to see it, when my cum pours into you.”

Rey’s expression goes blissful, as if his command is what she’s waited to hear her whole life. 

“Yes, Alpha.” 

She props herself against his chest and starts lifting herself - just halfway at first, then working herself the whole way up and then back down every inch of him. He’s bigger now, in rut, and she pants with the effort.

Ben keeps running his hands all along her, cupping her breasts, thumbing her nipples, brushing his fingers across her mouth and watching her lips grasp at his fingertips. He makes her work for it, not helping lift her but coaxing her on with the command-tinted words that seem to please her so very much. 

“You’re doing so well. You make Alpha feel so good. So proud of you. You look so beautiful, working to ride me. You’re going to look even better with all my cum inside you.”

Rey’s mouth falls open from where she’d been sucking his fingers again. She’s sweating now, but barely manages to beg as she sinks down again, “I want all of it, Alpha. Will you give me all of it?”

“All of it,” Ben promises. “That’s what good girls deserve.”

When Ben feels himself getting close, Rey whimpers above him and squeezes her eyes shut, even as she keeps her momentum, taking him all the way inside her again and again.

“You’re getting bigger, Alpha. I-I think I’ll fall apart…”

Ben hushes her, does his best to pitch his voice in a soothing croon despite how his heart races and his orgasm builds. 

“My knot wants to fill up every inch of you. You’re doing so well, Omega. I know you can take it. You’re so good. Soon you’ll have your reward.”

Just moments away, Ben gives a final command, “Listen to me, Rey.” 

He cups his fingers at her chin, makes her look at him even as she keeps lifting and lowering, as her breath comes hard and fast with the pressure building up inside her. 

“After I’ve finished and you’re full of me, I’m going to pull out of you. But you’re going to stay where you are. I’m going to hold you there, and you know what you’re going to do, Omega? You’re going to hold all my cum inside you.”

Rey nods, her mouth parted and lips bright red from biting. “I’m going to hold all your cum inside me. Where it belongs.”

Ben rumbles approval. “Exactly. You’re going to hold it in until I tell you it’s okay to let go.”

“Yes, Alpha. I’ll be good.”

Rey drops herself down again, and Ben grunts as his knot throbs, starting to pulse into her. He wraps his hands around her waist and pulls her down all the way onto him when he starts to come in earnest. 

Rey’s chest heaves as Ben’s release pumps into her. She bites her lip, her smile wide.

“You’re so _warm_ , Alpha,” she murmurs, eyes slipping closed. “Makes every part of me feel so good. So loved.”

“You are, Rey,” Ben rumbles, fingertips stroking her sides. “So good, and so loved.”

Time passes, both of them breathing in sync as they feel Rey’s body strain to accommodate all the seed he keeps pressing inside her. 

“So deep, Alpha,” Rey murmurs, her head tipped back as she savors the strain. “You’re _everywhere_ , I can’t make sense of it…”

“I’m about to pull out. You’re going to do as I said, aren’t you?”

Rey nods, still smiling with her blissful expression as all of Ben’s release spreads within her.

“Yes. I-I’ll be good for you.”

Ben holds her tight at the waist as he lifts her off of him. His eyes dart between her face, where she squeezes her eyes shut and bites her lip in effort, and her cunt, where she’s clenched tight and only a few thick drops fall from her. 

Ben makes a deep, rough noise of approval. 

“Look at you. My good girl. Your body wants to drink in all my cum, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Rey gasps, her effort apparent as she shakes all over. “This is how I’m meant to be. Filled up with you.”

Her breath catches, and a few thick drops leak down her thigh. 

“You’re so… _hot_ inside of me. Can feel it everywhere,” Rey gasps, trembling harder now. 

Ben watches her with rapt attention, “You feel how I’ve claimed you?”

Rey nods. One of her hands slides down towards where Ben holds her at the hips, her fingers covering his.

“My body is yours, Alpha.”

Ben’s next breath is punched from his lungs. 

“Let go, Omega. You did so well. Rey, Let go.”

Rey sobs as she finally relaxes. In a hot rush, Ben’s cum streams down her thighs.

She is begging, pleading from above him, _Alpha_ interspersed with Ben’s name. 

Ben seizes her and presses her to her back. He thrusts himself between her thighs and presses his mouth to the mess of slick, cum, and _need_ between her legs. 

She is incoherent above him, her thighs shaking violently on either side of his head as her fingers pull at his hair. 

Ben wraps his lips around her swollen clit immediately, hearing her grateful sob above him. He circles his fingers in the slick mess still trickling from within her, pushing his fingers back inside just to feel where she’s hot and still wet, her muscles quivering from being so overworked. He sucks at her clit until she screams, her entire body seizing and a fresh burst of slick pouring out from inside her. Ben laps at her cunt until she’s in pieces, breathless and begging for him in a different way. 

Ben wipes his mouth and chin as he pulls away, then immediately climbs up to wrap her in his arms. He cradles her close as she shakes against his chest, a few tears leaking from her eyes as she comes down from such a high height. 

Ben presses his lips to her forehead and murmurs again and again, “So good. You did so well, Rey. Alpha is very pleased.”

Rey wraps every single one of her limbs around him, cuddling in as close as she possibly can and without any heed to the mess of fluids between them. 

“Alpha has been so good to me. All I want is to make him happy.”

He kisses the top of her head another five times or so. 

“Alpha is amazed by you. He is so very lucky you’re his.”

Rey makes a soft noise of gratification, nuzzling closer until she finds a comfortable position atop Ben’s chest. 

Eventually, Ben will carry her to the bathroom for another bath. For now, though, he can’t bear to be parted from the press of all her warmth against him. He keeps kissing her forehead, stroking her hair back and brushing the backs of his fingers against her cheek. 

He wants to tell her how beautiful she is, but words are so coarse beside her ethereality. He is almost afraid if he speaks she might disappear, that he might wake from this dream.

A while later, she’s the one who finally speaks.

“Do I make you happy, Ben?”

She doesn’t quite look at him when she asks. Her gaze is off towards the window, but her fingers seem to tighten just a little bit against his bare chest.

The question is somehow completely different, now. It is about more than just biology and heats. It hints at the clouds that sometimes threaten all her sunshine; at Ben’s refusal to ever think he needs an umbrella.

Ben trails his fingertips through her hair, then carefully along her back.

“More than you could ever know. Rey, I came alive the day I met you.”

Whatever she needed to hear, his response seems to mollify her. She closes her eyes, and presses just a little bit closer to him. 

“I love you, Ben. Mate.”

Ben quickly looks to the window. 

This is no time for tears. 

“Rey, I... I love you, too. Mate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright we still got SOME plot between all that shameless, excessive heat porn. Rey has explained about the accident and why some of her memory problems may be self-imposed, but we'll still have to see what Ben does with this awareness going forward. And whether Rey will ever be ready to think about confronting how she deals with her past trauma. :(
> 
> Yeah this was also some of the filthiest filth my brain has ever produced. The angst drove me to it??
> 
> Catch me eagerly watching the comments section! Or on [tumblr](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/) and occasionally on [twitter!](https://twitter.com/xoruffitup) Thanks so much for sticking with this fic the whole way so far. We're nearing the homestretch!


	9. I Know The Sound Of Your Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay with this part! We've got just a little bit more angst to weather here, but I hope you'll all find it worth it. 
> 
> Shout out to [Ali](https://twitter.com/EverSoAli) for helping me with the medical/neurology part of this chapter! I had no idea what I was doing without her. :'')

  
[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/49932358248/in/dateposted/)  


A week after the end of Rey’s heat and about a month into their new life together, Ben is the one to first bring it up.

“You know, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t still see Will.”

Rey stares at him like he’s grown three heads, until Ben quickly amends, “Just as friends, I mean.”

Rey gives him a long, inscrutable look.

“Wouldn’t that be… weird for you? Hard?”

Ben shrugs a little, looking towards his feet a bit awkwardly. “He’s your oldest friend. I don’t want to be the reason that ends.”

The open though now silent text conversation with Will still stares out at Ben from his phone. Ben knows it was Rey’s decision, but he’d be lying to himself if he claimed he doesn’t feel guilty nonetheless. Will had been the one with selfless courage enough to knock on a door Ben had thought locked for good. He doesn’t deserve to lose Rey entirely because of it. 

That, and part of him is still convinced she needs those ties to her past - to her world before Ben. 

Now that they’ve spent a heat together - now that they are mated for good - Ben is finally sure about everything. He is finally convinced beyond even his most stubborn self-doubting habits of Rey’s certainty, her fulfillment in the bond fate drew between them and that she decided to color in blissful shades of reality.

Ben has no need to hide her away for himself.

Rey stares at Ben hard, trying to parse his calm expression as her thumb hovers over Will’s name in her phone. 

“Are you sure? Don’t make yourself suffer through it because you think it’s some noble act or something equally stupid…”

Ben’s mouth quirks. “Just call him.”

*

They see Will at least once a week. They invite him over for dinner, or meet him for coffee on the weekends. 

Ben wanted to just about be sucked into the floor, when they met in a quiet cafe for the first time. He had to resist his normal impulse to constantly be touching Rey in some way - keeping his hands firmly knotted in his own lap rather than resting on her thigh or over her shoulder. He sits as a mostly-silent observer as Rey and Will catch up on the past few weeks since she moved.

“Your monster ivy plants are taking over. You have to come get them.”

“Not my fault you’ve been watering them too much.”

“Not my fault you got plants you knew were way too big for the space.”

“We’ll have enough room for them in the living room, right, Ben?”

“Um. Yeah, think so.”

Rey just continues on gleaming as Ben shifts uncomfortably in his seat and looks everywhere but at Will.

“What about work?” she asks, already moved on. “Did you get that proposal done you’d been slaving over?”

“Yeah, finally! But it will still take a month for us to hear back. Shit, it could have all been for nothing, you know.”

Rey scoffs. “Way to be cynical. If you don’t win this one, just steal all your own ideas for the next one. Eventually you’ll rake in the dough.”

“Eventually, we’ve got to. What about your painting?”

“I finished six new pieces this week! Six!!”

“Damn. Really? Oil or acrylics?”

“Oil, though I’ve been throwing in watercolor now and then.”

“What color schemes?”

“Oh, a landscape with green and yellows. A night sky of blues and greys…”

Ben notices how closely Will is watching Rey, and realizes his questions are subtle experiments.

Rey prattles on happily, engrossed in explaining her recent color blending discoveries, so only Ben seems to notice the meaningful glances Will keeps sneaking in his direction. 

Ben clears his throat and picks up his tea. 

“You should come over sometime,” Rey says, her words abruptly roping in Ben’s full attention. 

“Uh…,” Will falters for a moment. “I don’t know if that’d really be…”

Rey waves her hand in the air. “No, really. You should. Right, Ben?”

And then Ben and Will truly meet each other’s eyes for the first time all evening. There, Ben finds only earnest inquiry - not a single one of the accusations he’d feared.

Ben sits forward in his seat.

“You should. Maybe dinner sometime. We all know Rey can’t cook to save her life, but I can.”

“You dick.” Rey shoves Ben’s shoulder, and he pretends at falling out of his chair. When he rights himself, she’s giggling and lays a hand in his lap. “Actually, Ben can cook a mean pot roast. If you bring over my ivy plants sometime, we’ll compensate with food.”

Ben can’t help privately marveling at her just a little bit. It’s only been a few weeks, but she uses the new “we” so easily. As if it isn’t new at all. It rolls off her tongue so seamlessly - somehow, neither man at the table with her can find reason to feel uncomfortable.

“Bathroom - just one sec.” Rey’s fingers idly dance across Ben’s shoulder as she floats off from the table.

Ben’s stomach twists with apprehension at being left alone, but when he looks up, he only finds Will watching him with open astonishment.

“She remembered every single work she did this week. Details, colors, everything. She remembered what you cook.”

Ben nods, smiling automatically. He lays his hands on the table, twirling a sugar spoon between his wide palms. 

“She’s having a good day - when she doesn’t stop to worry or think too much. I’ve been reminding myself not to get outwardly excited every time she remembers little things, so I don’t make her self-conscious. But obviously I do.”

Will nods. Of course he understands perfectly.

“Not every day is like this, though,” Ben admits. “If I can’t text her every hour or so while I’m at work, she still panics. She remembers moving, but not where to.”

Will looks down at a spot on the table, rubs it with his fingers. 

“What do you do?”

“I connected our phones so I can activate the GPS tracking on hers remotely and come get her, wherever she is. Her home screen tells her to text Ben.”

Will seems unduly interested by the little discoloration on the table.

“But she remembers you, doesn’t she? As soon as she sees you.”

Ben, for his part, pays careful attention to spinning the spoon between his fingers.

“Yes. She does. Even when the name’s not there right away.”

Rey flutters back to the table, still smiling broadly.

“So, Will. Could you come over on Friday?”

Will pretends to sigh, thoroughly put upon.

“Yeah, yeah. Me and your monster plants.”

On Friday, Ben makes his pot roast. Will arrives punctually. A few hours in, the evening gives itself over to laughter and sincerity.

*

Ben agonizes over the thought for weeks. He rewrites the text at least a dozen times. 

_Did Rey ever try traditional therapy?_

Will’s response comes an hour later.

_Let’s meet._

The following week, Ben makes the chicken parmesan Rey says she might like even better than lasagna. As they finish eating, Ben falls quiet. Rey notices. When she asks him what’s wrong, he takes her hand and leads her to the couch in the living room. He keeps her hand in his lap. 

Ben has no idea what his next words might do to her. Will gave him an idea what to expect from his own experience years ago, but Ben has never once even hinted at pushing her this way. 

He strokes his fingertips across the familiar shape of her hands, and trusts.

“Rey. I know it’s been a while since you’ve seen a doctor.”

Her expression shutters. She withdraws her hand from his and wraps her arms around herself. 

When she speaks, her tone is foreign - something near accusatory and approaching betrayal.

“You said I didn’t need healing. You said you didn’t mind reminding me of things every day.”

One sentence in, and already Ben is hopelessly off script. His head spins with remembrances he thought impossible. It’s all the more reason to force himself on. 

“And I meant it. Both those things. I love you just the way you are and I wouldn’t change a thing about you. But, Rey… I know _you_ don’t like forgetting.”

Rey looks away, her mouth hard but her eyes sad. 

Ben makes no move to touch her, but continues on, “Neither of us understand why you remember certain things sometimes. Like now, when you’re mad at me. Or when we’re in bed together, and you’re not thinking about it but everything comes rushing back to you. Or when I touch you after being away from you all day.

“But maybe someone else out there could understand. A professional might be able to make sense of all this. You _can_ remember, Rey. I know it. I’ve just heard it. And I don’t want you to lose another day more.”

Rey’s chin wobbles. Ben hates himself. 

Her voice cracks around the words, “You don’t _know…_ ”

“I talked to Will,” Ben cuts in as gently as he can. “He told me you tried psychotherapy for a few months, after your diagnosis years ago. But then you refused to keep going.”

She is quiet for a moment. Surprised.

When she speaks, it is soft and terribly small.

“I hated that doctor. He looked at me like a _thing._ Asked me horrible questions as if they meant nothing.”

“We’ll find a new doctor. The best one.”

Rey shakes her head, rallying counter-arguments.

“It’s too expensive. It could be for absolutely nothing…”

“Rey. You know I make enough. And I added you to my health insurance weeks ago.”

Tentatively, Ben rests a hand feather-light across the back of her shoulders. Little by little, Rey relaxes enough to allow the touch. 

“Please,” he gently implores. “I won’t ask you to do it for me. You don’t owe me anything. Just think about doing it for yourself. After everything you told me about…” His voice trails off, he swallows hard around the spike of anger before he forces himself on, “...about your father. I think there’s a real chance things could get easier for you. The accident - it wasn’t the real cause. Seeing a therapist and maybe a neurologist just once - it could answer a lot of questions.”

This time, her voice comes warbling and helpless in a way that freezes the breath in Ben’s chest. 

“You don’t know what it’s like. They test me and prod at me like I’m just some broken thing.” Her gaze shifts a bit closer to him, her expression listless like he’s never seen before. “I just want to be _normal_ with you. I don’t want doctors telling me everything wrong. I don’t want you to… to… “ Her voice wobbles. Ben’s heart pounds, his hand on the back of her shoulders lifts to gently cup the back of her neck, his thumb stroking her skin. 

“...I don’t want you to see me differently. As someone who needs doctors and therapy. You already spend so much time helping me, reminding me, and I’m getting _better._ I know I am - being with you. Doctors would just set me back. Just make it worse.”

“Your memory has been getting better, it’s true. You almost always know who I am now and what we are to each other. You keep pulling little details from weeks past. Since we mated, so much seems to come more easily to you.”

“It’s because I’m happy here, with you. Because I feel safe and I trust you so much. Please, doctors would just make things bad again. Trust me.”

Ben’s lips press together hard. He’d told himself all day that he would insist, but right now he knows he can’t. 

“Okay. Just… just think about it.”

Ben already did all the research, of course. He takes one of the many business cards he collected from therapy practices and pins it on the fridge, where she’ll see it now and then. 

Then he retrieves the ice cream, to let her forget for now.

*

The following week, Rey has one of her worst days in a long time. 

The first panicked texts come to Ben’s phone around lunchtime. She’d stopped needing as many regular reminders throughout the day, so Ben keeps his phone silenced during a consultation with an important client. He doesn’t see until three hours later, well after her texts have stopped. 

Ben runs to his car, already tracking Rey’s phone. Her location dot appears just outside a park on the entirely opposite side of town.

Heedless to the grass stains ruining his best shoes and suit pants, Ben walks the entire circuit of the park. Finally, he finds her sitting beneath a tree. She lifts her head, the tear tracks on her face evident. 

As much as he yearns to run to her and take her in his arms straight away, he knows to approach her cautiously, until he’s figured out how much she remembers.

She watches him come closer, then asks in a plaintive, helpless voice, “Are you….. Mate?”

Ben swallows hard. He swallows past the fact that this still hurts. Each and every time. 

“Yes, Rey. I’m your mate. It’s me, Ben.”

“Ben.” She shapes the word carefully, delicately. She watches as he comes still closer. “I… I realized I forgot someone. And it was… such a huge hole. This emptiness I couldn’t make sense of. I didn’t know how to go on. I didn’t know what to do.”

“It’s okay, Rey. It’s all going to be okay.”

Finally, he lowers himself into the grass beside her. He reaches out slowly, and when she doesn’t pull away, he lays his hand at the back of her neck, over their mating mark.

“I’m here, Rey.”

Her expression relaxes - the distress and sadness gradually melting away. Slowly, Ben can see some clarity come back to her.

“Ben,” she breathes, falling in towards him. He catches her and holds her close. He just rocks her in the grass for a long time, until she seems calmed. 

When he looks up, he notices a bright red smear across one of her knees. His breath goes shallow. 

“What happened to your leg?”

Rey looks down at the injury, her expression puzzled. 

“I… I don’t know. I don’t know how I got here from the studio. If I got on a bus or walked and ran into something…”

“Let’s get you home and cleaned up.”

He helps her up, then asks, “Do you have your phone?”

Rey sinks her hands into the empty pockets of her skirt. She frowns.. “I don’t know where it got to.” Her expression clouds, remorseful. “I’m sorry, Ben.”

He hushes her immediately, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “There’s nothing to apologize for.” He takes her hand. “Come on, let’s go home.”

Rey is silent on the drive home. Still, little by little she seems to collect herself. She takes Ben’s hand across the console, as they sit at a red light. 

At home, everything filters back to Rey little by little. Ben knows that now, things do eventually all come back to her, but waiting for it to happen remains difficult to navigate.

Rey goes to the bathroom. Ben watches from the doorway as she immediately opens the cupboard under the sink and locates the first aid kit. 

“I know this is where we keep it,” she says softly - a small offering. 

Ben gives her a slight smile, trying to tamp down his distress at the blood still too bright against her knee. Without any idea where it came from, it will have to be thoroughly cleaned. 

He shrugs off his suit jacket and lays it over a towel rack. Rey sits on the counter as Ben cleans, disinfects, and dresses her knee. It’s not deep, luckily, but will need a few weeks to heal. 

When Ben finishes affixing the bandage, Rey’s fingers float to his face and lift it. 

She speaks softly, apologetically, “This is our bathroom, in our house. You’ve kissed me right here on this counter too many times to count. You dried my hair here, when I was in heat. You held me in the bathtub. I… I’m sorry I forgot.”

“It’s okay, Rey,” Ben breathes, resting his hands at her waist and drawing reassurance from her presence. She is safe and whole and here with him, where she belongs. 

“It was awful… being without all that.”

“I can’t imagine. If I ever lost a single detail about you…”

Ben traces the shape of her lips with a fingertip. He tries to stop thinking about her lost, without a phone, not knowing where home is. 

Ben holds her close, burying his face against her neck and breathing shakily into her hair. 

“Tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m okay, Ben. I’m with you. I’m home.”

Rey tilts her head so her lips can press to his jaw. She sits up just enough to reach his lips. She cups his jaw as they exchange slow, comforting kisses. 

Eventually, Ben trails kisses down her neck. At her shoulder, he eases the collar of her shirt down just enough to lay his lips over her mating mark. 

Rey’s whole body relaxes against him, curling into his warmth. 

The wealth of their shared memories flashes before her eyes, making her dizzy with fulfillment. 

“Home,” Rey breathes. 

Later, after they’ve made love and Rey is fully herself again, she insists on helping with their late dinner. She goes to open the fridge when she sees it. The business card. 

She freezes in place. A myriad of conflicting reactions well up in her.

“Rey? Everything alright?”

Ben turns from where he’d been browning meat on the stove, frowning when he sees the anxiety lining her features.

She takes the business card down from the fridge, turns to him slowly.

“Where did you get this?”

Ben takes a deep breath, setting the wooden spoon down. “I researched the most highly recommended therapists in the city. We… had a talk about it last week. I suggested seeing one, but… you didn’t take to the idea too well.”

Rey’s expression is carefully neutral as she places the business card back. She stares at an undefined point for a long time, standing still. Ben keeps browning the meat, watching her out of the corner of his eye and trying to gauge her response. 

The meat is almost finished by the time Rey finally moves to open the fridge. She hesitates for a long moment as she scans the contents. Then, she bites her lip and reaches for the eggs.

She brings them to Ben.

“You asked for… three eggs?”

Her voice is very small. So small, Ben doesn’t quite understand what’s happening. 

“Just two, sweetheart.”

“Just two,” she repeats. She takes them out, cracks them into a bowl, and places the bowl next to the stove for Ben to use. She brings the rest of the eggs back to the fridge, murmuring under her breath just loud enough for Ben to hear, “Just two. Just two.”

The fridge closes, and Rey stands in front of it again, unmoving. Ben cooks a little further, until the pan reaches a simmer and he can safely walk away.

“Rey?” He walks closer, placing a hand on her arm. When she looks up at him, her expression is resolved.

“I’m going to go.”

Ben’s brow furrows. “Go?”

Rey takes the business card down again. “I’ll go.”

Now it’s Ben’s turn to stand still, his mouth opening and closing in a loss for words. Rey takes the opportunity to declare, “Whichever practice you think is the best. I’ll go. I’ll try.”

“Rey… are you sure?”

Rey nods just a touch harshly. Compulsively, her fingers bend the paper of the business card. 

“Yes. I can’t.... I can’t even remember how many fucking eggs the recipe needs when you told me thirty seconds ago. You had to miss work and your best suit is ruined because I got myself lost like a child. Scraped knee and everything.”

“I don’t give a damn about the _suit.._ ”

“That’s not the point, Ben,” Rey flares, turning away from him to slam the card down on the counter. “The point is I don’t want to be this burden for you. I don’t want to be so helpless.”

She stands so perfectly straight and tall, it takes Ben a long time to realize her breathing has taken on a slight stutter. 

He approaches carefully, sensing the anger she’s working through. He places a hand carefully at her side, then tips his head down until his forehead rests against her hair. 

“You don’t have to do it for me,” he tells her softly. 

She finds the hand he rests at her side. She sniffs once. 

“I know.”

She turns into his arms and squeezes him. 

“Will you make the appointments?”

He squeezes her back.

“Of course.”

*

For a while, things get worse. 

Rey is angry at everything. Because Ben is so very much of her world, he receives the brunt of it. 

“I’m never going back.”

“You promised, Rey, five sessions at least.”

“To hell with that. You can’t make me go back!”

Fuming, Rey storms back and forth in the living room, pacing with her arms tightly crossed.

“There’s nothing _wrong_ with me. They treat me like I’m sick, like I’m some child. Like I haven’t been living my own damn life this whole time.”

“You went because _you_ wanted to. I won’t make you, but I will remind you what you wanted. Please, Rey, just one more.”

Before he knows it, Ben finds himself talking to Will more than he ever thought he would. When he starts feeling too guilty, when Rey seems dangerously close to cracking and swearing all the doctors off, Will reminds Ben he isn’t being selfish. Will reaffirms this is the kind of care Rey should have kept receiving the whole time since the accident - if only someone had been firm enough with her about sticking through it. 

In short, slightly tense messages, Will admits he was never brave enough to push her because he’d never been sure it wouldn’t make her leave.

One week a time, Rey keeps going to therapy. Some weeks need more urging than others. A few weeks cause full fights. Still, Ben manages to keep her regular.

Then comes the other doctor. Ben texts Will, unsure all over again.

_I don’t go to the therapy sessions with her. I thought I should let her go to the Neurologist alone, too? I don’t want her to feel pressured._

_Go with her, dumbass. Call if questions come up about her medical history._

_You could come too._

_Her mate and her ex? That’d be a crowd._

_More like her mate and her best friend._

_Thanks, but I think it’s best if it’s just you. She might get overwhelmed. For real, call if anything comes up._

In the waiting room, Rey holds Ben’s hand in a deathgrip. 

“They’re going to ask all these awful questions.”

“I’ll handle all the ones I can, okay?” He strokes a thumb across the back of her hand. “I had a long talk with Will about your medical history. He expects a call if the doctor asks anything we don’t know.”

Rey goes quiet, focused only on where her hand is enveloped in Ben’s. 

“Thank you, Ben.”

He squeezes her hand. The nurse calls them back.

They return two weeks later to review the results of Rey’s new MRI. In the dim examination room, Ben rests a discrete arm around her as the doctor explains the projected scan results.

“Using her original scan from shortly after the injury, we see she suffered an epidural hemorrhage. This was most likely due to a combination of the impact injury and the lack of oxygen to her brain in the minutes immediately following. However, the hemorrhage and corresponding malformations don’t appear nearly as severe here in her current scan.” 

He taps the two scans, highlighting the differences. 

“It’s impossible for the damaged neurons to regenerate, but over time, brain and memory function could be restored by relying on different brain structures. Essentially, the brain adapts, finding a way to reroute impaired functions through new synapses.” 

Rey looks between the two scans with wide eyes, trying to reconcile what the doctor is telling her with the experience she still lives everyday. It doesn’t seem to to fit; her mind keeps rejecting the implication.

Ben sits forward. “So you’re saying the injury _wasn’t_ permanent.”

“I don’t mean to downplay the severity of the physical trauma. The epidural hemorrhaging was severe. But we can see between both scans that there seems to be no lasting damage to the medial temporal lobe. Eventually, it’s certainly possible that impaired memory function will be restored. Perhaps not to full capacity, but it should improve in time.”

Ben has too much to say. Far too much. Breathless words catch in his throat and he tries not to sound too eager.

“Rey is seeing a therapist, to try to work through any reasons for her amnesia beyond the injury. Is there anything else we can do?”

“That’s probably the most important thing. Injuries like this tend to leave marks beyond the physical.”

When the doctor asks if they have any more questions, Rey finally speaks up. 

“Can we keep the scans?”

The doctor nods as he raises the lights. 

“Of course. They’re yours.”

Rey holds them in her lap in the car. Her fingers are tight around the edge of the envelope. 

“Ben? Do you have a shredder?”

Ben shoots her a surprised look.

“At the office, yeah.”

He pulls up at a stoplight. When he looks at her fully, she is smiling. 

“I want to go to your office with you tomorrow, and I want to put these through the shredder.”

“...you do? You don’t want to maybe keep them? It seems miraculous, Rey, how your brain adapted like that.”

“No. I don’t want them in our house. I don’t want this injury in our lives any longer.” She rolls down the window, lets the wind blow through her hair. “If I can eventually heal, then it doesn’t matter anymore. Like it never happened.”

Ben just looks at her, long enough that a matching smile slowly grows upon his own mouth. Long enough that the car behind them at the stoplight honks.

At home, Ben hugs her close the second they’re through the door. 

“Thank you for going today.”

Rey’s arms loop around his torso. She buries her face close against his chest. 

“Thank you for making me.”

“I didn’t _make_ you.”

“Whatever.”

Rey makes no move to pull away, so Ben keeps holding her there. Eventually, Rey presses just a little bit closer.

“You know the truth, Ben?”

“About what?”

“Well, hearing that today made me a little bit scared.”

“Scared? Why? He said the physical reasons for your memory loss should keep improving.”

“What if I just can’t control the other reasons for it? What if… what if I always have this problem remembering things, only… there’s no permanent physical injury to explain it? What if it’s just… me?”

Ben frowns against her hair. He just holds her for a long moment, thinking carefully.

“Then… we’ll know we tried everything we could. We’ll enjoy our life together and love each other just the same.” 

Rey presses her nose against his neck, breathing in his scent and the never-any-less- wonderful way her own interweaves through it.

“I’ll keep going to the therapist. Even when it’s hard. I’ll go for you.”

At first, Ben feels the urge to object. He doesn’t want that to be the reason. But after a moment, he decides he should just let it be. He knows she is making a gesture, and he shouldn’t question any motivation that will keep her going to her weekly sessions.

“Thank you, Rey.”

He tips her head up so he can kiss her lips. 

“Thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything's finally looking up for both these babies! :') Now Rey's got her man AND hope that her memory will heal, and Ben knows he's doing everything he can to get her the care she needs. I've upped the chapter count by one because I've left the final section for an epilogue. I'm happy to report the epilogue is mostly the fluff you all deserve after hanging in through all that angst with me!
> 
> As always, I would so love to know all your thoughts! :D Can't believe I've nearly finished posting this story - it's been a journey! 
> 
> I'm also around on [tumblr](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/) and [twitter.](https://twitter.com/xoruffitup) :)


	10. Don't Worry Darling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Without further ado - the gentle epilogue these babies and all of you deserve. <3
> 
> (Huge love and thanks to [Katie](https://twitter.com/lifeboldlyblows) for yet another gorgeous mood board! They make my whole life :'D)

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/181686886@N04/50053015006/in/dateposted/)

They buy a townhouse with plenty of sunlight, where Rey fills every last window with flower boxes. It’s only a five-minute walk from Rey’s studio. Ben had suggested they perhaps look in the suburbs for a place big enough for Rey to set up a home studio, but she loved her studio space too much to give it up.

Ben walks the route with her when they move in, back and forth from the studio at least a dozen times. 

For good measure, he talks to the owners of a few of the businesses and homes along the way. 

“Excuse me. Hi - I’m Ben. My mate and I just moved in around the corner. I have a bit of a strange request, but maybe you won’t mind. My mate, Rey, has a form of amnesia that makes it hard for her to remember how to get home. She works up the street there but since we just moved, I’m worried about her getting lost. Would you mind if I hang this up outside, just for a couple months?”

When Rey insists Ben start letting her find the way home herself, the little signs greet her at almost every corner. 

_Rey - this way home._

In their new bathroom, Rey affixes the sticky note she kept all this time to the mirror.

_Ben loves you._

“I would have hoped you’d know that by now.”

Rey just smiles, hooking her arms up around Ben’s neck as they stand in their new bathroom, in their new home.

“Maybe it’s best if you remind me again.”

Ben smiles and pulls her in against him, then up away from the floor.

“That can be arranged.”

*

One day, Rey comes home with a tiny, cream-colored puppy in one arm and a crate dangling from her other hand.

Ben stops her on the porch.

“Rey, we can’t. I’m allergic.”

She blinks at him, eyes far too wide and much too endearing. She frowns, her bottom lip protruding in what suspiciously resembles a pout. 

“I’m sorry, Ben. I forgot. I think it’s too late to take him back now...”

She flutters her eyelashes a few times. Ben has the distinct impression that this is something she did not forget. He gives a heaving sigh - the kind that moves his wide shoulders all the way up and back down. 

He stands aside for both Rey and puppy. 

“I know, I’ll name him after you. Benji!”

Ben scowls. “You certainly will not.”

But Rey is already grinning and cooing at the puppy, and it’s much too late. 

_I promise I still love you more than the puppy._

Ben’s phone buzzes with a picture from the pet store, where Rey holds several boxes of allergy medication. 

It buzzes again. This time, the photo shows Rey’s shopping cart, full of dog toys and treats. 

_Probably??_

When cans of the expensive dog food appear in their pantry which Rey firmly doesn’t remember buying, Ben pretends to be as surprised as anyone.

*

Ben no longer has to wake her with reminders. At long last, she wakes with recognition and love in her eyes - warm and immediate. She rolls closer to him when his alarm sounds on weekday mornings, soft murmurings of his name rising from her lips.

Rey replaces his reminders with a daily habit of her own. At some point in the day, she’ll run through her ever-growing list, adding to it and changing it a bit each day.

“You work at Thomson, Wright, & Solo - the big glass building on Parkway. You made partner last year. There was a big party and I got a bit drunk and forgot I probably shouldn’t kiss you in front of all your colleagues. Your favorite movie is _Space Odyssey._ I watch it with you all the time, though I still think it’s boring. But you watch _The Bachelor_ with me, so it’s fair. 

“You wear black or blue all the time because you don’t know how to match colors. I bought you a bright purple tie, but I’ve only seen you wear it once.”

“I wear it!”

“Don’t interrupt me! Where was I? Oh, right. You’re an amazing cook - your chocolate chip pancakes and chicken parm are my favorites. It ticks you off that I still like the store bought lasagna better than yours, though.” Ben scoffs, Rey talks over it. “I’ve managed to lose two phones in the last year, but you got me replacements both times and you never got mad at me.” 

Rey pauses for a second, nose scrunching as she thinks, actively reaching for the memories - welcoming them. Now, she welcomes them all. Wants to keep them all.

“Oh - we went to the beach last month, and you got so sunburnt you whined about it for a week.”

“Hey, that’s not usually in your list,” Ben objects.

“Distract me again and I’ll make you clean up after Benji every walk for the next week. Okay, what’s left…? You like milk in your coffee even though you deny it. You wear size 12 shoes and Large shirts, which I finally remember after I kept buying you things in the wrong sizes and you kept making up excuses as to why you couldn’t wear them. You come to all my gallery openings and negotiate some of my sales for me. At the last opening, I would have sold that watercolor for two thousand, but you got the price up to _five._ ”

“I thought it was worth seven, at least.”

“ _Ben._ ”

“Sorry, I’m done.”

“You don’t really like chocolate, but you buy it for me and when we go out you don’t complain about splitting the chocolate desserts. Oh! When we went to that amazing ice cream shop, on our trip last month. You said I couldn’t possibly finish a chocolate sundae that huge, and then I ate two just to spite you.”

“I’m disgusted to this day.”

“And yet you always keep buying me ice cream. Strawberry. Or sometimes the kind with the dark chocolate pieces. You always keep the back of the freezer full of them.”

Ben sighs, smiling when he thinks Rey isn’t looking. “Yeah. That I do.”

*

“No no no,” Rey grumbles one morning when Ben’s 6 AM alarm sounds. 

After he shuts it off, he rolls close to kiss her forehead in apology. But Rey latches her arms around him and doesn’t let go.

“No no,” she insists blearily, eyes only half open. “Stay.”

Ben breathes out against her hair. 

“Rey, we both know your heat is over. And I have an important client meeting…”

“Don’t care,” Rey swiftly interrupts. Even more quickly, she reaches up to pull his face down to kiss properly. 

“Stay,” she whines, rubbing herself against his thigh while she nibbles gently along his bottom lip.

Despite the nearly-endless sex they’ve had this week during Rey’s heat, a groan spills from Ben’s chest all the same.

“Rey…,” Ben practically pleads as her lips trail down to his jaw. “I shouldn’t…”

“You’re right,” Rey breathes against his neck, her hips still working along his thigh. “You shouldn’t go. You should stay here with me. Inside me.”

Ben trails his hands along her body, until one lightly brackets her throat.

“You know I can deny my mate nothing.”

Rey licks her lips, not looking away from his eyes and how raptly he watches her.

She lets her bare thighs fall open around him.

“Your mate wants you for one more day. Just one more day, Ben.”

Already half inside her, Ben bends down to mouth at the fading marks along Rey’s shoulder, left by his own lips and teeth throughout the last few days. She whimpers as her body tightens around him, as she eases into his possession like coming home.

“One more day, Rey,” Ben submits, pushing the whole way inside.

*

She forgets his birthday. Ben doesn’t mind - he never does anything special for it anyway.

She’s not there when he gets home from work, and perhaps now he’s just a bit put out. She doesn’t answer her phone. He eats alone. He cleans the kitchen just for something to do, to distract himself from the dispiriting emptiness of the house.

Until she rushes in, near 9 o’clock, heaving a canvas with her. She is out of breath and upset.

“I realized this afternoon. I felt so stupid, I was so mad at myself. I went to the studio right away because I had to paint you something amazing to make up for it.”

Rey holds up the canvas, splattered with a bright array of still-drying patterns of paint. 

Her eyes are wide, peaking over the top of the canvas at him with apprehension as she goes on, “Not just for today. But all the days I forget. And then it took me forever because I wanted it to be perfect and I missed dinner on your _birthday_ and if you’re not pissed, then I’m pissed at myself enough for both of us.”

Ben simply stares for a long moment. At the swirls of color defying shape or convention - the one-of-a-kind piece of artwork she made just for him. Then his gaze traverses up to her face, watching him with a mix of apprehension, contrition, and hope. A masterpiece.

Ben comes to take the canvas from her hands. “After I get it framed, we’re hanging it in the bedroom.”

Rey brightens. “Really?”

“Really. It’s extraordinary.”

He stares at it for another long moment more, before he carefully rests it against the wall and comes to take Rey in his arms. 

“Thank you, Mate.”

“I’m so sorry I missed dinner. I lost track-”

Ben pulls back just enough to cup her face in his palm. “There are plenty of leftovers. You’re here.”

Ben leans in and kisses between her eyebrows.

“You’re here. It’s perfect.”

*

When Ben comes down with a bad cold, Rey destroys the kitchen making the worst chicken soup in history. Ben eats it without complaint. 

She draws him a bath and bullies him into it. She tells him to shut up when he makes noises about sleeping on the couch so as not to get her sick. 

“You’re a very mean nurse,” he grumbles as she forcefully cuddles him in bed. 

“I can be meaner,” she says as she pins his wrists up above his head and crawls over him. 

The next morning, she calls Ben’s secretary to let her know he won’t be in today. Then she brings him his favorite breakfast in bed - bacon only just burnt and scrambled eggs _not_ burnt, along with a huge glass of orange juice. 

“I can be nice too,” Rey insists, kissing his cheek. 

Ben sneezes. He can’t quite taste his breakfast, but he assures Rey it’s delicious.

*

Sometimes, Will can’t help watching them. He figures it’s a mix of masochism and genuine fascination. He arrives a bit late to Rey’s exhibition opening, and finds himself hovering in the doorway. 

The open gallery space is crowded, but not so much so that Will can’t spot them right away. Rey always has a crowd around her at these openings, and Ben is always at her side. 

When his arm isn’t resting around her waist, she leans into him so some part of them still touches. They have an uncanny habit of looking at each other at precisely the same moment and sharing a smile at seemingly nothing. 

They never interrupt each other. When they’re in a group, they make conversation in perfect sync. When they split off into separate side conversations, it’s clear they both remain perfectly aware of the other - immediately rejoining if one of their names is mentioned. Rey makes jokes at Ben’s expense, which he bears with grace. Ben gives candid, straight-faced ovations to Rey’s artistry. He recounts how many hours Rey spent in the studio for each piece, until her buyers agree to a higher price.

Will knows he was never much good at these. He certainly couldn’t talk shop. 

After a few minutes of lurking, Rey spots him. Her grin is immediate. She taps Ben’s chest and murmurs something to him before leaving the group to speed over. She throws her arms around him. 

“Did you win the grant?!” she asks in greeting. 

Will told her on the phone about the project - days ago. He hides his amazement.

“We did! The proposal was accepted!”

She emits a soft screech of joy. “Amazing! Oh, congratulations, Will. You deserve it after all the work you put in.”

She hugs him tight again. Will can’t help imagining when she would have kissed him at the news. Even despite the time he still needs for those thoughts to fade, he feels a certain reassurance in the way things are now. As if, perhaps, they were always meant to be this way.

“Thanks, Rey.”

“Will you come over after this is done for some drinks to celebrate?”

“Depends. How many pieces have you sold already?”

“Just two. But…” Rey lowers her voice conspiratorially and bobs her head towards the large group from which she just escaped. “Ben thinks he’s got two more locked up over there.”

Will can’t help his chuckle. “You two sound like you’re running heists.”

Her grin comes light as a feather, floating with mischief.

“People paying thousands of dollars to take home my art? You bet your ass it’s a heist.”

Rey sells four more pieces that night, and insists on stopping to buy the three of them fancy champagne on their way back to her and Ben’s house.

A few months later, Will brings a girl named Sarah to one of Rey’s openings. She holds Will’s hand and smiles shyly. Rey might hug her a bit over-enthusiastically, but fortunately that isn’t enough to scare her off.

*

“When I talk about permanence, what comes to mind for you?”

Rey has to blink her eyes a few times to return to the present moment in her therapist’s office. She’s been dreamy all day - thinking of the giant flower bouquet filling Ben’s arms when he appeared spontaneously at her studio that morning. 

“Ben - what… what are you doing here?” she’d asked, trying to wipe some excess paint from her overalls. “I thought you had to do that big - what was it - deposition today?”

Ben shook his head, smiling wide at her over the flowers. “Moved to tomorrow. I got something much more important in my inbox this morning.”

Rey paused wiping the paint away, her expression curious. “What?”

“Remember the agreement I drafted for the art collector who wanted those huge commissions?”

Rey froze entirely, but remained silent long enough for Ben to recognize the details seemed beyond her reach.

“To the tune of fifty thousand?” Ben supplied, making Rey’s eyes go wide. 

“He signed it today. The job is on.”

Ben deposited the flowers he’d brought for her on a side table, so he could sweep Rey up in his arms instead as she exclaimed her excitement - and her disbelief.

“But Ben, you could have called me. You didn’t have to come all the way! And oh _no_ I think I've gotten paint on your suit...”

“Of course I had to come. Over a call I couldn’t do this.” 

Then he’d kissed her, and as one kiss morphed into countless more, the ridiculous, embarrassing thought twirled in Rey’s head that Ben’s unexpected presence this morning might have brought her just as much joy as a fifty thousand dollar contract.

“Rey?” the therapist prompts, a patient smile on her face. 

“Sorry,” Rey mumbles, shifting in her seat. “What was that?”

“Do you recall last week, when I talked about the idea of permanence, and how you can use that to ground some of your memories?”

“Yes, I think so. Most of it, anyway.”

“For example, we talked about your artwork. That’s a source of permanence that can ground everything around it. If you find you’re having trouble remembering something, choose one piece of your work to look at when that happens. When you see it, you’ll know that you created it. That knowledge and that evidence is always with you - it’s permanent. From there, you can remind yourself about the time you spent creating it, about your studio space, maybe about other creative ideas and work you’ve done since then. 

“It can be helpful for you to think of those sources of permanence in your life. You only need a few, but they can serve as an anchor for all of the other, smaller things that might easily slip away. You trace the connections between those things, and soon enough it will all stay in place in your mind”

Rey shifts in the chair, crossing her legs. A small smile already rests at her mouth.

“My art is a good source of permanence in my life,” Rey agrees. “There’s a still life hanging in the living room at home - it’s one of the first pieces I ever made that I’m truly proud of. Looking at it helps me remember when I painted it - it gives me a grasp of how much time has passed since then. It helps me remember how far I’ve come.”

“What else?”

Rey’s smile grows easily as she relaxes in her seat.

“Ben. Ben is permanent”

The therapist can’t help the tweak of a smile herself. She’s heard plenty about Ben. 

“But you just met him two years ago, didn’t you? Could you explain that a bit?”

“When or how we first met hardly even matters anymore. Ben reminds me about that day, but I don’t think of our relationship as having a starting point - and certainly no end point. It’s just… always been there. _He’s_ always been there. Even when I couldn’t remember who he was - when I couldn’t remember how, I _knew_ him. 

“And it’s more than just that feeling of knowing him for ages. Beyond knowing that he’s always been there and he always will be. It’s knowing how he loves me. The fact that that will never change, just like blending red and blue paint will always make purple.”

Usually, the therapist tries to coach her patients away from reliance on a partner for their mental health or self-image. She has seen too many cases of over-dependence on a significant other turn terribly wrong.

But for Rey and her Ben - the normal concerns don’t seem to apply. Everything she hears of Rey’s mate expands the very definition of devoted. And besides all that, Rey has demonstrated so much independent growth. Even from week to week, she seems to improve. Gradually, she remembers more and more details of their previous sessions. When asked about her week, Rey will produce more and more anecdotes, descriptions of her recent works, and stories beginning with “Ben…,” each of them accompanied by a wide smile.

After starting as one of her most difficult, resistant patients, Rey has become one of the most promising.

“That’s very good. Why don’t you tell me what else comes to mind from your week?”

Later that night, Rey lays mostly on top of Ben on the couch as they watch _The Bachelor._ Ben still tries to feign disinterest, but Rey knows he’s secretly become equally invested.

Pleasantly distracted by Ben’s scent, by the way his fingers trace lazy patterns along her lower back, Rey finds her mind wandering. Away from the screen - instead basking in this moment of her own reality. Rehearsing techniques her therapist taught her, Rey traces connections in her mind between this moment of warm safety and the many others before it.

She turns her head away from the TV to nuzzle Ben’s neck, only half aware she’s speaking aloud when she murmurs, “You’re permanence.”

Ben makes an indistinct sound, more of his attention absorbed by the show than he would ever admit. “What’s that?”

Rey shakes her head, cuddling still closer to him. “Nothing. Love you is all.”

Ben’s hand shifts to stroke through her hair. “Love you too.”

*

Ben freezes in the doorway to the flower shop. Rey is in a bright sundress, her arms full of flowers as she turns to exit. She halts abruptly, the paper bundles of flowers nearly spilling from her arms when she sees him blocking her way. 

“Sorry,” he says hurriedly, stepping out of her way. 

She adjusts the flowers in her arms until she can see him over the top. She gives him just a small smile. 

“Do I know you?”

Ben looks down at himself and smooths his shirt. 

“Maybe the tie will jog your memory?”

Rey screws up her mouth, thoughtful. “I’m sorry. I have this condition, you see?”

“Well then… How about you give me something to remember you by?”

Rey’s gaze dips down to the bouquets crowded into her arms. Her face blooms in a smile. 

“I have just the thing.”

She manages to pluck a single daisy from one of the bouquets. She steps close enough to slide the stem into the outer pocket of Ben’s suit jacket. 

She looks right into his eyes as she says, “It suits you perfectly.”

Ben bends over her armful of flowers to kiss her. They share the same smile as he pulls away. 

“Now your daisy from the first time we met won’t be lonely anymore,” she says.

Ben is already removing his jacket to place it over her bare shoulders as evening falls outside. He is already taking the armful of flowers from her to carry himself. She hooks an arm in his and leans her head on his shoulder as they leave together for home.

“It hasn’t been lonely in a very long time,” he replies.

*

It is a sunny summer day, bright but not yet too hot. The river sparkles in the afternoon light. The last drops of Rey’s ice cream have long melted in the paper dish beside her on the bench. She is distracted by the comfort of Ben all along her side - and by her daily list. 

“You don’t use any hair product. Your hair just looks like that thanks to some witchcraft you definitely sold your soul for. You’re very particular about your workday morning routine. If you don’t shave before you brush your teeth, your whole day’s thrown off. You’re bad at laundry. You accidentally dyed one of my white dresses pink and I never forgave you for it.”

“Never?”

“ _Never._ Though the weekend after, you did build me those raised flower beds in the back yard so I guess you get a pass.”

“Got the splinters to prove it, thank you.”

“You’re such a baby. Oh, just like that time when you cried while we watched _Up_!”

“Never happened. Lies don’t count in your daily list.”

Rey chortles and reaches up to give Ben’s cheek a mollifying pat before she settles against him again. 

“Let’s see… You like long drives. When we went on that road trip, you did all the driving and didn’t even complain. My mom loves you. After she met you the first time, she threatened to disown me and adopt you instead if I mess things up. You still don’t really talk to your parents, but we’re working on it.”

Rey reaches for Ben’s hand before she goes on. She clutches his fingers close and leans her head a bit further against him.

“You asked me to marry you on July 18th. It was a… Friday?”

“Sunday.”

“A Sunday. You brought me daisies. You went on one knee right here in front of this bench. That was two years ago now, to the day.”

Ben keeps his hand in hers. He leans his head towards her and closes his eyes. He could lose himself just listening to her recount the details.

“You managed to keep the honeymoon a secret until we were on a plane to Italy. We spent the next month seeing the finest art in the world - Rome, Florence, then Paris. It was enough to inspire me for lifetimes.”

Rey watches the river drift by them. Her fingers play with Ben’s as she remembers. 

Some days are hazier than others. She can’t claim to remember all the rooms in the Louvre or the Vatican museums. She can’t pretend to recall half the dinners they shared. But when she caused herself anxiety in the weeks following due to her desperation to remember each detail, her therapist had helped make it easier. What they ate, where, the names of the hotels, the number of hours in each museum - those aren’t the things that matter. 

What matters is the way it felt to wake up in Ben’s arms on that first morning in Rome, knowing she was his mate _and_ his wife now; tugging him by the hand each and every time they passed a chocolate shop and how he indulged her in every last one; the way he sat with her on benches in the galleries, staring at a single piece of work for however long Rey desired; how he never grew impatient no matter how many times she had to ask about the itinerary; his agreement when she wanted a spontaneous midnight picnic on the lawn in front of the Eiffel tower; the way he found new ways to make her mindless with pleasure each and every night.

Those aren’t dates, names, numbers or faces. They are part of her. Just like Ben - they never go away.

Ben used to be tormented by the part of Rey’s brain that struggled to retain him. Now, he’s come to love even this about her. 

Now that she knows _Ben. Mate. Home._ for unchanging fact and always recognizes that he’s hers; he doesn’t mind that she sometimes forgets their post code, or the fact that he can make tiramisu, or exactly how he looks in the black sweater she loves, or that particularly devastating place inside her Ben knows just how to reach.

After all, Ben knows the supreme joy of watching Rey fall in love with him in small ways over and over again. He doesn’t mind a bit.

This time, he knows it’s permanent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to all of you who've come along on this ride with me. It means so very much. I couldn't have predicted exactly how much this story would expand and possess me when I first got the idea, but I'm very glad I let it have its way with me. Hearing all your thoughts and reactions along the way has enriched my experience with this story so much, so one more time I'd like to ask that you lay it all out in the comments. I appreciate it so much as I say goodbye to this story for now. <3
> 
> I've got two other works currently in progress! One is the long overdue final chapter of [Love It If We Made It](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19841884/chapters/46984972) . I added a short epilogue a few weeks ago responding to the current political moment, but that story deserves a proper final chapter and I plan to bring it full-circle.
> 
> Then I have the beginnings of a brand new fic: A dark magical AU featuring modern spunky teenage Rey and dark Fey prince Kylo. Strongly inspired by the lush Faerie world of Holly Black's books, and hopefully with just as much sexual tension. >:)
> 
> All that said, I hope to be back very soon with new material to post! To keep me going in the meantime, I'll be re-reading my favorite comments here and hoping to chat with you all more on [tumblr](https://xoruffitup.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/xoruffitup). Thanks again so much to each of you for reading - hope to see you soon for the next adventure! :)


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